Being Roasted on a Literary Skewer

Seeking advice never ceases to bite me in the ass.

I wanted to enter this writing contest with a piece that I wrote a year ago. It's a pretty dark semi-autobiographical (but for all intents and purposes FICTION) short-story. My older sister hated it when she read it last year.

So who did I call for advice about submitting this story? My sister. She still hates it.

And the advice she gave me made me feel like I was roasting on a literary skewer above a pyre composed of my best written pieces and all of my pride.

I read her a description of the story I was prepared to enter (I had filled out all parts of the entry form, all was left was to hit "send"), and she said something that catapulted me into a chai tea binge. Needless to say, I never did hit the send button.

"That's so cliche. You need to separate your life from your stories. Your life is cliche."

Ouch.... Ouch ouch ouch OUCH.

Truthfully, my life has been a bit cliche, I will admit. But not in the typical cutesy sort of fairy tale way. It has been more like drama, despair, drama, despair, and now finally, normalcy. So I have to extract myself from my stories, but how can a story written by a living breathing cliche, avoid being so cliche?

I love to write pieces with traces of myself in them, but apparently it does not provide a fascinating enough story premise. So here I am. I have turned to blogging as my new arena for spewing my cliches out into the world (sorry to those who will read them).

 I hereby resolve from here on out, to try to write fiction that is really, purely fictional.

In meantime, I am going to sip on chai tea and blog until all the cliches have been emptied out of me.

XX Lauren