When I was plotting my story backwards, I found that a lot of my scenes were repeating with the same conflict, the same goals. I did research and was recommended to change my setting, or add new information in each scene. The problem is my setting is very limited, with everything happening in one mansion. Additionally, whenever I try to spread the clues out for my plot twists, they either dont align with the plot so that the character organically discovers it. How could I fix my story so that my scenes are varied?

It's real tough out here for us guys 😮‍💨 Don't get me wrong, I love that genre fiction has become much more respected and taken a lot more seriously than how it used to be 50 years ago, but the resulting consequence is that there is virtually no space for literary fiction, especially online.

I feel very out of place in writing subs where everyone is writing fantasy, romance, dystopian, thriller, sci-fi, horror, and I have me and my little short collection too embarrassed to contribute to any meaningful discussion.

I'm honestly just looking for more teen writers who actually write literary fiction, and what their books are about.

Hello! I didn't intend to post 2 things so close together about "would you read," but I had an idea I wanted to get opinions on if possible.

I've grown up in a very rural area, with large families on both sides, and as you know, that's created many hilarious, emotional, and unique memories for us. The idea crossed my mind to write a small/medium length book full of stories I can remember, and I considered even maybe getting my grandparents to tell me stories so I could dedicate sections to them and their lives. Not like an autobiography or biography, more just like a compilation of short stories about the unique things in the world I've grown up in.

Do you think this would reach very far or at least be an interesting read for someone who tried it out? Lmk what you think.

I’m like 140+ pages in already heh…

1. ⁠A book from 3 perspectives taking place in 1999 New York. Alternating perspectives like chapter 1 is character a, 2 is b, 3 is c, repeats. All 3 of them do not know each other until they connect at the end (the last chapter for each character)
2. ⁠The story is about 3 teenagers who all have different struggles, whether it be mental, social, socioeconomic, or a combination of them.
3. ⁠I’ll introduce the characters and their stories

- 1: Niven Cohen is a 17 year old Jewish boy who lives in immense poverty. He lives with his disabled father, who became disabled after a car crash that also killed his mother. Niven’s father cannot work due to this so Niven works a weekend job. One day at his job, a 6 year old girl named Noa comes and asks for food because her family is hungry and cannot afford it. Niven immediately builds a relationship with Noa and her family. However, Niven is also harassed at school. 4 boys, whom he calls “the beasts” physically hurt him at school, and Niven fears for his life every single day.

- 2: Parker Leung is a 17 year old girl whose life used to be very happy. However, about 3 years ago, the family was going to say their goodbyes to her older brother Luke for the next few months because he was moving into his Harvard dorm. Parker is about to open the car door when Luke puts his hand on the Handel and gestures for her to go in first, and they end up getting into a car crash with a drunk driver and Luke doesn’t make it. Parker’s parents cannot cope with the grief, so they take it out on her, and expect her to get perfect grades and she has to be the perfect daughter, but she’s never good enough, so her parents physically abuse her, and parker sh because of it. At school, she has a best friend almost like a sister, Serena, and a girl Katelyn joins their friend group after her friends ditched her at the beginning of the story. Parker is anxious every day and barely hanging on, and Serena is the only person who knows her struggles.

- 3. Miguel Romero is a 17 year old boy who lives with his abusive alcoholic father. One night, after his father has a massive like agression thing, Miguel decides he’s going to escape from home. He escapes and sneaks onto a bus that takes him to New York. He’s now homeless, but he meets a gang who steals and does bad things to get by, because they’re struggling like Miguel. Miguel joins but hates what he’s doing. Ngl I just started so idrk know what else to say lol

These characters all meet at the end after a massive tradgedy, and the book will end on a like not cliff hanger but like an emotional turmoil thingy.

Anyways would you read sorry for the tangent lol

Hellooo! So I've been working on my current WIP for about 8 or 9 months now, and I've not shared much about it to anyone except my mom. I would like to know if other people our age would be interested in a story like this, and if there are any critiques as to what I should do. I would like to preface this with an apology for such a long post btw 😭 But here is the plot summed up:

It's late 2070s and many scientists have been monitoring and exploring a far away planet. The planet became well known for being very similar to Earth, and visually appealing (most natural colors are different than the ones on earth). These same scientists also have noticed that the health of the earth has hit a sharp decline, and it's likely that the planet wont last much longer.

So all teens that live within a certain distance of the Space Center between the ages of 14 and 19 have their names put in two large containers. Think hunger games style name drawing, although that wasnt the inspo for that lol. Their names are drawn to be sent to this new earth-planet. One girl is drawn (Chrys) and one boy (Blue). Ages 16 and 17 respectively. Legally, they are now required to go, with no opting out. Neither of them are too overjoyed about it, but they arent completely upset either, because they both have slightly crappy lives (something very common in the recent years for the earth).

So within the next two months, they are given basic information about where they will be and what they will do. Things like: they will be the only people there, most wildlife is harmless, there have been crews sent within the last year to build a large house for them and future residents, and the only remaining contact they will have with the people on earth is regular schedules of things being shipped to them, like food and clothes and other needs. Then they are sent to the planet, to basically give a new start to human life, in a place that isnt dying.

However, they soon run into a dilemma. They are, in fact, not the only people on this planet. There is an entire functioning civilization not too far from their new home, and many others far away. They slowly become welcomed into the community, and are told that the scientists from earth actually did know these people were here, and were even teaching the nearby residents english for the last few years so they could communicate with the "future visitors."

The nearby community is set up similarly to a typical kingdom, but the family in ruling is much more interactive with the people, and it is a very small, close knit place. Except for the royal family ofc.

They only have one child, Eviah, and he is 16. Soon, he will be 17, and he will take the place of his parents on the throne. Eviah is the first to become close friends with Chrys and Blue, and even has an almost-relationship with Chrys.

But the kingdom is on the verge of war with another kingdom, and Eviah's parents get killed in an attack from the opposing kingdom, forcing him to the throne many months earlier than had been planned. The next dilemma is that within this kingdom, the king must have a queen to rule legally. Eviah, being 16, doesnt have a wife to become queen. So he is now forced to find a queen before a two week time frame is over (when he gets the official title of king).

Instead of choosing someone from his community though, he chooses Chrys, because being on the throne with someone new, and someone from a different planet at that, would symbolize things like alliances, an open and warm kingdom, etc. U get the idea. Chrys refuses to be his queen though. So he sends guards to bring her to his home, and gives her no choice. Blue tries to prevent this, but in the process "assults" eviah (punched him once, in Chrys's defense) and Eviah obviously doesnt like that. And he sees that blue will be a problem in his plans. So he drafts Blue into the attack he has soldiers training for, sent in retaliation for his parents being killed. The rest of the book is just Chrys struggling with trying to escape eviah's control, blue surviving on the battlefield, and both of them trying to reach each other.

Eviah gets killed by being cocky and going to the battlefield himself. That means that Chrys is now the queen and the sole ruler of the kingdom. This is amazing in itself due to other factors I dont feel are relevant to mention here, but now she has the power to command for blue to be sent back home. She does just that. She is also given a short time frame to find a new king, and she chooses blue to rule with her, which the community loves, because they adore the "new kids", as the people call them occasionally. The story will go on into a couple more books, but that is how the first one ends, is with blue returning and them beginning rule together.

So let me know what you think! Again, sorry the post is so long! 😭

1. Hermes (Vocalist)

2. Fenrir (Guitarist)

3. Tristan (Bassist)

4. Maximo (Drummer)

 

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment. It had been stripped bare—nothing remained except a single, loosely bound manuscript placed precisely in the center of the floor.

一The Publisher 

Preface

 
This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other related materials. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the span of a decade with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________. 

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.” 

There are things that ought to remain buried. Things better left to rot beneath the withering hand of time. Truths consigned to paper, once unearthed, bring not enlightenment, but ruin. So if there existed the slightest thread of mercy within this world, these pages should have been consigned to flame long before they reached the hands of another.

Yet I could not bring myself to do it.

I have tried before. More times than I care to admit. I've stood above open flames, the embers dancing in the wind as I grasped a whole section of the records with shaking hands. Only to recoil at the last moment before the pages turned to ash. One winter, I dragged every single last item pertaining to this investigation into the alley behind my apartment building. I stood there staring for what must have been at least an hour. In the end, I brought everything back inside. 

Even now, years later, I still cannot explain fully why. What compelled me to continue with my pursuit?  Curiosity is, I think, humanity’s oldest sin. Or perhaps there is something within these pages that refuses to be forgotten. 

I have spent the better part of a decade organizing and archiving what you hold in your hands now. What began as a simple editing job slowly metastasized into something else entirely. This is not an investigation in the conventional sense. It is the culmination of fragmented accounts, many of which were half-burned, waterlogged, or otherwise rendered nearly illegible before they ever reached me. 

I have tried to preserve the integrity of the material. Yet I believe such a task has become impossible long ago. 

It began with an email. At that time, I was employed as a freelance editor. I primarily worked with academic writing, articles, field reports, and investigative journalism. Most of my clients were forgettable, just a name tied to a document. They came and passed like the changing of the seasons. Nothing more than a list of deadlines and revisions. That vanished from my life at the moment of completion.

Julian Mercer was one such client. He was an investigative journalist by trade with a knack for going to places where the world had turned a blind eye to. Always in some sort of war-torn country or out in the middle of nowhere in some remote village. He seemed almost attracted to those places in hindsight.

His messages were always brief, almost clinical. Purely professional, not even the slightest hint of personality bleeding through.  I always found that admirable. It was kind of refreshing compared to some of the people I had to deal with.  At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work. We never met in person or even called.

The first email arrived on February 16th, 2011, or at least that's how I remember it now.  It was past midnight, and I was unable to sleep; the rain was beating at the window of my apartment for hours. While the pipes groaned and hummed. It made the idea of rest almost impossible. I was halfway through reading a dissertation on post-Soviet economic reconstruction when my phone notified me of a new message.

It was an email, and I still think about what might have happened if I had simply ignored it. Maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I opened it. It stated 

 To R.Hayes,

These documents need to be looked over and reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of my friend Elias' disappearance. Therefore, I need the assistance of another to organize the accumulated information I have acquired so far.

Attached:

• Police report (Callaway)
• Local interview 1 (audio transcription available)
• Retrieved photographs
• Constructed timeline
• Research notes (partial corruption detected)
• Statement excerpts
• Recovered dive recordings — catacombs
• Diary entry (fragmented/incomplete)

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

 一 From J.Mercer

At that time, there was nothing remarkable about it. Strange certainly, but remarkable no. In my eyes, it was nothing more than a regular work email. I had edited enough fringe investigations over the years to become desensitized to eccentricity. Hyperfocused cases like this happen all the time. Ranging from cults, killers, missing persons, local disappearances, and weird rituals deep in the woods. Yet the more you dig, the more you realize how mundane those things truly are. I believed that this would be no different.

I pressed play on that first video, and it was a black screen with static washing over the video, only accompanied by sound. You could hear the soft falling of the rain and the slight sound of the wind in the background. It was 17 hours long, and it stayed like that until exactly 15 hours, 12 minutes, and 11 seconds,  in which a low metallic screeching sound could be heard. Then 15 seconds of silence, even the rain had stopped. Then a noise. At first, I mistook it for static, but the more I listened, the more it resembled breathing. As if something had dragged itself into the room. I remember replaying that section well past three in the morning. 

The boxes arrived 3 days later. It was a total of 7 unmarked boxes that were delivered without a return address. My landlord left them outside my apartment sometime around noon while I was asleep. I remember waking to the sound of him banging against the hallway radiator with a wrench while shouting that my packages were blocking the stairs again. 

The amount of materials he had sent me were overwhelming. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of burned documents fused at the edges,  Cassette tapes labeled in hurried handwriting, Hand-drawn maps of tunnel systems, Fragments of interview transcripts, Newspaper clippings dating back decades, and journals. The journals were extensive…

Some belonged to Mercer personally, while others appeared far older. Some segments were completely illegible, either from water damage or purposeful mutilation. Entire paragraphs were scratched so vigorously that the pen had torn through the very paper itself. Only to be rewritten. While other pages lay barren with nothing but phrases repeated over and over again til the ink bled through the page.

I told myself I would spend no more than 2 weeks on this.

It ended up taking me almost 2 months to get through it all. 2 whole months of endlessly scouring through those boxes upon boxes filled with nonsensical writing that seemed to give way under their own weight.  However, I seemed to get lost for hours on end within those pages. The way in which everything was so disjointed yet deeply connected. 

I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. I was ready to forget about this, honestly, weird experience.

But it wasn't that simple. I tried to exist within the mundanity of my own life. Finding the ability to be content within my own routine. Yet those endless boxes of unfolding stories created labyrinths in my mind that I was unable to escape. The thought of what truths they might hold lingered with me like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. I tried to contain such urges, my curiosity pulling at the seams of my very being. 

Once again, I was tempted. Another delivery of those same unmarked boxes accompanied by another email. I knew even then it was probably in my best interest to leave whatever was buried in those boxes there. But I did no such thing. I explored the crevices of every word that was given to me. Hanging on to every detail as if it were scripture. Determined to uncover the truth that lies here.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu
Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus
Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." 

(repeated in Mercer’s recovered notes without attribution. His underlining) 

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) 

It was even more than last time—documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of videos that were half-broken or destroyed. It was as if I was staring into an abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. 

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Their contents are better lost in the winds of time. Some of those videos were days long, filled with twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as they ventured further. The only sounds to be heard were the slow and drawn-out breathing of the recorder on the other side and the groans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it. The never-ending shifting within the darkness. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls.
 
So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. As time bled into words. It took me almost a year and a half this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Months of non-stop work as I slaved away. Only interrupted by the arrival of more boxes. First, every couple of weeks. Then once a week. Then daily. I spent all that time interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those boxes. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. I became obsessed with finishing the analysis of these records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him with an attached message. That said, he was deeply disturbed and should probably seek psychological help before publishing this. After which, without even waiting for a response, I blocked him. I didn't even want but one moment that might allow my curiosity to pull me back in.  

As relief began to wash over me, I heard the slight ping of my phone. And when I went to check, it was a single message that read  “It's gotten you too.” I blocked the number without question. I spent the rest of the day sitting there.

For almost 3 years, I ignored the constant and quite pestering curiosity. That festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. The truth was that no amount of distraction could fully calm my weary spirit.  I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. There were probably better ways to cope with these feelings, yet I'd just ignore them. 

 I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions. I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they fervently flip through the pages. Some were in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text that, in their quickness, they accidentally tore entire sections from the binding. Each interpreted it differently, holding to their own version of truth. 

We must have talked for days about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Our discussion ran on, and on, with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Something rotten on every page. After a while, my friends refused to talk about it. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of that, that sense of compulsion remained. 

Somewhere along those lines is where the nightmares began. The whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams. They demanded action to know what lies behind the next page. They screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where the nightmare ended.

It got to a point where I began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company I had long since lost. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren in my own existence. 

And that's when the phone call came. From a lady who said I was listed as an emergency contact for a J Mercer. She was informing me that Mercer had vanished. I did not respond immediately. I stood there, the phone still resting softly in my hand. 

The official reports stated that Julian Mercer had disappeared sometime during the winter of 2017. They never gave an exact date.

A body was never found.

The official explanation suggested accidental death somewhere within the catacombs. A fall, disorientation, or anything simple enough for paperwork to digest cleanly. But after everything I had read by then, simplicity no longer felt believable. 

I received that call three days after his disappearance was formally reported. Not from the police. From the landlord. The landlord sounded exhausted. Irritated more than concerned. He spoke quickly, mumbling through what I initially assumed was a rehearsed explanation regarding abandoned property and overdue payments. I remember only fragments of the conversation clearly.

There was water leaking through the ceiling. The neighbors had complained repeatedly about noise during the late hours of the night. Several rooms smelled strongly of mildew and seawater despite being nowhere near the harbor. And then almost absentmindedly, the landlord mentioned the walls.

He said Mercer had covered nearly every surface of the apartment in paper.

At first, I assumed exaggeration.

Until he emailed me the photographs.

I wish he hadn’t.

Even now, I struggle to look at them for long periods of time.

The apartment no longer resembled a living space. It looked more akin to the aftermath of prolonged captivity. Every inch of wall space had been consumed by overlapping layers of paper and annotations. Maps pinned atop photographs. Journal excerpts taped beside medical records. Newspaper clippings connected through frantic spirals of red ink. Certain sections had been scratched over so violently that the drywall itself was exposed beneath. The landlord informed me that local authorities intended to dispose of most of the material due to water damage and “unsanitary conditions.” 

Without fully understanding why, I booked passage to the island that same night. I told myself it was a professional obligation. Someone needed to preserve Mercer’s work before it vanished entirely. But if I am to be truthful, and after everything that has happened, truth may be the only thing I have left. I think some part of me had already made the decision long before then.

I needed to know how the story ended. That desire eclipsed every rational instinct I possessed. It eclipsed Fear. Even self-preservation. By then, curiosity no longer felt human. 

The voyage to the island lasted approximately eleven hours. I spent most of it contemplating what I'd find when I arrived. while the ferry groaned against violent winter waves outside. Sleep evaded me entirely during the crossing. Every time exhaustion threatened to drag me unconscious, I would hear something shifting within the hull beneath my cabin floorboards. Each time I investigated, nothing was there.

The island itself did not appear on the horizon so much as emerge gradually from the fog. Dark cliffs and blackened waters. A shoreline littered with crooked buildings pressed tightly together beneath looming hillsides. From a distance, the town resembled something preserved accidentally from another century. Narrow streets winding between towering stone structures whose architecture seemed oddly inconsistent even from afar. Certain buildings appeared connected where they should not have been. Windows were misaligned between floors. Rooflines bending at impossible angles against the mist.

I remember my first thought upon seeing it.

It looked wrong.

The townspeople unsettled me even more. Most avoided eye contact entirely. Those few who did speak answered questions with an almost rehearsed vagueness that bordered upon hostility. Several denied knowing Mercer altogether despite appearing repeatedly throughout his interview transcripts. Others claimed not to remember significant events documented extensively within the records.

One elderly fisherman insisted Mercer had never arrived on the island at all.

When I informed him I possessed photographs proving otherwise, the old man stared at me for several seconds before replying:

“Then why have I never seen him?”

At the time, I dismissed the comment entirely.

Mercer’s apartment was located above an abandoned tailor shop near the northern edge of town. The building itself leaned slightly sideways beneath decades of ocean weathering, its upper floors creaking constantly against the wind as though the structure resented remaining upright.

The landlord refused to enter alongside me. He handed me the key while standing nearly halfway down the street. I remember noticing then that several windows facing Mercer’s apartment had been boarded shut from the inside.

I asked why. The landlord only shrugged. “People kept complaining about the lights,” he said. The smell hit me almost immediately upon opening the door. Mildew. Saltwater. Rotting paper.

The entire apartment felt damp despite the radiators still functioning. Water stains crawled across the ceilings like spreading veins while towers of documents consumed nearly every available surface. The photographs he’d sent me had not exaggerated anything. If anything, they had failed to capture the sheer scale of it.

Mercer had transformed the apartment into an archive. Or perhaps a shrine. I spent nearly six hours that first night simply walking through the rooms, attempting to comprehend the volume of material surrounding me. Hundreds of tapes. Thousands of pages. Photographs stacked knee-high across entire sections of the floor. Several maps of the island are covered almost entirely in annotations. And at the center of the largest room, a massive hand-drawn diagram stretched across the wall. The catacombs. Or rather, Mercer’s interpretation of them.

The tunnels spiraled downward endlessly in overlapping layers of charcoal and ink until eventually the lines became so dense near the bottom that the structure resembled less a map and more a wound carved directly into the wall itself.

At the very center of it all, he had written one sentence.

Not in frantic handwriting.

Not chaotically.

Carefully.

Deliberately.

As though he wished those words above all else to survive.

THEY ARE NOT BELOW THE ISLAND.

The moment I read that sentence, something inside me shifted. Even now, I struggle to explain why. Perhaps because until then, despite everything, some part of me still believed this investigation possessed a rational endpoint. That eventually the contradictions would align. The disappearances would resolve. The tunnels would become understandable.

But standing there alone inside Mercer’s apartment, staring at those words surrounded by walls of unraveling thought, I felt for the very first time the overwhelming certainty that whatever I had involved myself in extended far beyond a missing journalist or abandoned orphanage.

And worse still, that Julian Mercer had understood this long before he vanished. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I worked inside the walls of that apartment. I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I opened my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was as if Mercer had known I would eventually return. As only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. I found a room that was filled with the same type of unmarked boxes he would send me mountains of. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me. 

So I threw myself into the records. It had become that which gave me meaning. This is the accumulation of everything I am and have to give. This, which you are reading, is the second draft and will be the last. As I pray, this will never see the light of day. So no soul will be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

I am no longer certain about where the narrative concludes, or if it ever truly does. Even after I have moved on from this page, it seems to follow me. This is a slow, creeping presence that stalks and consumes, taking everything before you’ve forgotten what it means to possess. These words may seem insignificant to you now, but they linger and persist, unwilling to leave you even until your final breath. As I descend further into the labyrinth, the deceptions hide within each inconsistency that plagues this text.

-R. Hayes
December 18th 2020

So, I'm a high schooler who always comes up with movie and book ideas. The most recent idea I came up with really sticks out and I think writing a part or all of it could be good for my creativity and good to not let my ideas just marinate until I don't like them. The one thing is that I'd probably be embarrassed to publish a book, especially as a teenage dude. Plus, I don't really think I'd want to become an author when I grow up for a few reasons. So, if I don't want to have anyone other than myself see what I write is it even worth it to write at all? I just want some other opinions on if it could help me with creativity or in English/Creative Writing classes. Thanks to anyone who cares enough to reply.

Disclaimer:

Before you read the following quote I’d like to cover a few things…

I am not describing my own life and it is not a confession of my own personal pain, trauma or mental state.

What I am doing is asking and offering a cynical a deliberately dark philosophical observation about how I personally believe social life works. This quote in essence argues that emotional performance is a tool used to climb social ladders. That those who are less strategic end up absorbing those performances so they deeply lose touch with their own goals (hence the distortion) and that their world becomes; in the end, coated with lies.

You are allowed to find this quote too cynical, too harsh or just wrong but please do not confuse the argument for autobiography. A person can write something bleak without being broken lol, a teen like me can explore dark ideas without needing to be saved from them.

If you still want to ask “Are you okay” please do so if you read the quote thoroughly and not because you think a cynical quote must come from a wounded person. I would like to know how to improve my quote. Now enough of my yap fest here is the quote:

“The wise consciously falsify their emotions to rise in social hierarchy. The naive subconsciously embodies those falsifications; their main objective gets distorted. Their world becomes coated with lies.”