. I liked Rahih Alameddine’s reply a few weeks ago that he writes for revenge. Now that’s a solid reason. I’ll admit I’m a little worried about having a few writers in my family. My step-brother is an excellent writer and has already won quite a few awards, which is great. But how am I going to feel a few years down the line when he starts writing about all the things that went on in our childhood? Martin says he really hurt his mother because after reading the novel she thought what a horrible childhood she’d given her children. No one wants to look like that! Martin isn’t worried about getting too personal. Rather, he wants to get more personal, because what can he give the public that no other writer can give, but himself? It’s refreshing to hear my own feelings confirmed. In an age where teen horror flicks are re-made and re-made because that is what sells, and where television seems to set the standards under which society lives, it’s great to see that some artists out there believe in offering something new at the risk of failure. Then it’s another whether what you’re giving is yourself, or not. Not really important in my mind. My writing usually starts off about me, but then the characters grow and the story changes itself and suddenly there’s a story about what could have happened to me if I were a boy and I needed to murder my girlfriend…or something. Like Martin says, any story you write is going to be false. It’s a story! How many lives out there really are story material just as they are? Like on MTV’s Real World , there’s tons of editing and circumstances changed to make the storyline interesting. You’ve got to get rid of the good stuff, like Martin said he did about his childhood, thus leading his mother to believe the overall picture was a bad one. He simply had to explain to her that he manipulated the truth...
