Every story has a beginning. So does every blog, so here is my opening chapter, which mirrors my About section.
This is the blog for Marlon Manuel. I’ll focus here mostly on how narratives fill the culture around us, though I may stray into other territory. Like Gator football. Or trips to the mountains. Or scoops of chocolate ice cream.
Narrative surrounds us. In sports. In politics. In entertainment. In business. Telling stories is the easiest way for us to connect. We use them because they’re emotional and they’re memorable. From the earliest age, we learn to tell a tale. Storytelling is fun.
Writing? That’s another story. As the late sports writer Red Smith said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” That makes me a few quarts low. I’ve written professionally for nearly 20 years – most of that time for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (though none of it served using a typewriter). I’ve written stories from stadium press boxes, plane crash sites, courtrooms, zoning departments, developers’ offices and hurricane-ravaged communities. I once wrote a story on the back of a Styrofoam plate when Hurricane Georges hit Mobile, Ala., and soaked my notebook.
I’m now writing at Edelman, the world’s largest independent PR firm, about a variety of topics in a variety of ways – including narrative. I’m a vice president in Editorial Services, where we practically need daily transfusions for all the writing-induced vein opening that goes on.
That’s just a snippet of my story. What’s yours?
October 5, 2008 at 4:43 am
Well, I have written unprofessionally for all my life, but within a couple of years I hope to see my breakthrough in the noble art of novelwriting.
October 6, 2008 at 11:04 am
Good luck in writing your novel. I’ve thought of that direction many times myself but never overcame the inertia to actually get it started.
October 12, 2008 at 3:56 am
I have been writing what I call narrative reflections on contemporary life and times for the last ten years or so. I find it fascinating the diverse ways each of us get into writing, the styles we adopt, and the way we go about it. Ultimately we must all play around until we find what works for us. It is all an experiment into the power of observation. Good writing, at least for me, is crystalized observations.