The Terrible Horrors of Life

Write what you know about has always been what any inspiring writer is told to do. What any struggling playwright is asked to do. What any songwriter should write about. Something in your life that inspires you, the sunset over the lake, as two lovers sit around a small fire huddled together talking about their future. How many kids to have, what job they would like to do. What college to attend. How big a wedding to plan? What they felt the first time their eyes settled on each other from across the room and your heart said “I am going to marry that girl. She doesn’t know it yet, but we are going to fall in love and fireworks will burst in the night air, and birds will sing a chorus of songs to warm our hearts. And the songwriter in you writes a book of love songs. The playwright writes a 3 act play of Love found on a moonlit night. A novelist writes an epic tale of how the simple farmer, marries a princess and lives happily ever after. The poet writes a sonnet that immortalizes love found and lost.
Do I write about my relationship with my parents, their relationship as man and wife? Do I write about my siblings? Do I write about the town I lived in, the school I went too? My closest friends, their families, their parents and how they got along with each other. Did they live in paradise or hell? Was their life’s perfect growing up. Where their father or mother drunks, father a wife beater, or abused their children or cheat on their spouse. Where they the perfect family you write a 3 act play about how they were the perfect family. Do you write a tell all novel about how many times your uncle was married, or an aunt was married 3 times, twice to the same man? Do your write about your oldest cousin, running away from home at age 16 to get away from the abusive drunks for parents, and how all her younger siblings founds ways to cope living under such conditions and youngest dying at age 15 of a massive coronary related to fetal alcoholism and medical neglect. Do you write about your dreams? Your failures in life. So why not write about what you don’t know about. Make people believe you know something or just write about fantasy. Play it save make people believe in Fairies, and Goblins, or far away planets and space pirates. Fictional characters, stories, plots, locations, villains, bullies, heroes, love, all fictional.
This story is about four families in a community where each have different family dynamics, each with their own issues, and dysfunctions as a family. We have six teens the story revolves around, orbiting their parents issues and dysfunctions. Each family has a different economic background and dynamics that many face today in the real world, such as divorce, widowhood, professional commitments, re-entering the dating scene and addictions. Whereas our teens have their own issues and dynamics being teens age 13-17 dealing with peer pressure, puberty, sexual Identity issues, grief, feeling abandoned, ignored, misunderstood, marginalized, rejected teen love angst, and yes pimples. Somewhere in the story we experience each families crisis, angst, frustrations, anger, grief, authoritarianism, acting out by both adults and children alike, and searching for a common ground that unites the four families together. Life in suburbia.