Mom Burned My Stories
My mother burned my stories when I was a kid. Put my hand-drawn comic books on a barbecue grill and fired it up.
I cried.
She didn’t hate me. She wasn’t trying to be cruel. She was terrified that my lack of focus at school would lead to my destruction. My father had been an artist, a singer who worked with Nat King Cole and Louis Prima. And that career had ultimately failed, the consequences terrible for our family.
She was just trying to protect me from pain and death. On some level I recognized that even then. It was a twisted, painful sort of love.
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By the time I limped my way out of high school (she was so frustrated that she offered to get me lessons with Bruce Lee if I’d just raise my grades! Nope.) and entered college. But she asked me, BEGGED me, to stop writing and seek a different life path.
I tried. At LACC I went into journalism and worked on the paper. Later at Pepperdine University I took broadcasting, speech, journalism, drama…anything that wasn’t QUITE fiction writing. I tried. Mom was so afraid for me, terrified that if I didn’t excel, the world would eat me. But that if I demonstrated my full capacity, my fate would be similar to that of black men who intimidated whites in the rural Georgia of her youth — death.
So I tried. I really did. Kept my head down as much as possible, even though on another level my dream burned hot. Some of my college friends knew my dreams. Thank God for them — the embers were faltering.
Then one day there was a story-writing contest on campus. The winner would read their story to a gathering of alumni. So…I entered. And won.
I still remember that day, standing in front of a host of wealthy donors to the university, all of their faces rapt as they listened. I had them in the palm of my hand. All those white, shining faces. For that moment, I had transcended my race and social station.
I was a STORYTELLER. And they NEEDED to hear what I was going to say next. And at that moment, I saw my destiny as clearly as I did the moment I fell in love with my wife. This was a path. I could be who I needed to be in life, and if I could learn to do it well, the very people my mother feared would protect me. Why? Because I was making their lives better. Entertaining them.
As long as I could do that at a high level, I could be who I was, who I felt I was born to be. That’s the secret, you know: constantly increase your skill at something the world values, that you would do for free. AND…constantly increase your social skills and networking, as they manifest in marketing and sales. When those circles overlap, you have a life path.
I saw the path. Also saw that NO ONE I’D EVER HEARD OF had successfully navigated it, starting where I stood.
That realization is the PRECISE reason I’m so obsessed with self-improvement systems. I had to not only be the best writer I could be, I needed to somehow be more focused, more positive, more enduring than anyone I knew of. My salvation was in books, and lectures, and studying the lives of writers, as well as the lives of oppressed or disadvantaged people who had created lives of power and joy. Where THOSE two circles overlapped…I dove deep.
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Decades passed. Got knocked down 1000 times, got up 1001. Sought mentors, humbled myself and asked for help, and found kind and wise hearts and minds who responded. Learned. Grew. Succeeded enough to win awards and raise my family. And after 35 novels and hours of produced television, am finally getting my chance to not just have a movie made from my work but to DIRECT it with my co-conspirator and soulmate Tananarive.
And looking back over my life, I ask: if I could take everything I know and send it back to the younger man I was in High School, looking out at the world and wondering if there was a place for me…or even earlier, the child I was who watched his stories burn…what would I say?
What would I give him to help him believe there was hope? To help him focus his mind to learn the skills he needed more quickly? To understand the “Game” more deeply? To control his emotions so there would be fewer tears behind closed doors..?
What I would tell him is EXACTLY what Tananarive and I put into every class we teach. It is what we will pour into three hours of solid no-bullshit gold this Saturday, May 17th, from 2–5 pm Pacific, via Zoom or LIVE in Upland California. I have a sacred obligation to the child I was.
There is another Stevie out there, looking out at the world with hope. Another young Steven, in college, learning but not sure how he will leverage that education into a meaningful life. And another young man with a family, wondering how to balance responsibility with his deepest most sacred dreams.
I want to tell that young man that there has NEVER been a better time to be a marginalized creator. That if he can organize his energy, emotions, and mind properly, for the first time in American history there are actually some advantages, some gaps in the social walls he can wiggle through. Yes, there are. I could take three hours and talk to that eight year old, that sixteen year old, that twenty year old…and double his life success. Yes, I could.
And I hope that if this story resonates with you, if you’ve ever watched the face of a friend when you told a story…or watched a bad movie and thought “I could do better”…or walked out of a great film with tears streaming down your face, consumed by the hunger to do SOMETHING of that honesty and power…
That if any of these things are true, you will take whatever steps you need to learn who you need to be, what you need to do to walk that path. And this Saturday, we will do the very best we can to set your feet more firmly upon it.
Join us. WWW.WRITERWEBINAR.COM
Write with Passion!
Steve