Category: Creative Pieces

It’s a hot, summer day in Woodbridge, Virginia. While kids are riding their bikes down the street,  and toddlers are playing out in the front yard as their parents sip cold drinks on the porch, Grace Copeland and her father are moving boxes around in their basement. Her dad is putting together the store bought boxes together as Grace is in the closet area of the basement, waiting to pack everything to move to New York for college in the Fall. She looks around the small closet area, realizing she never really came down here and paid any attention to this kind of stuff in the first place. She wondered what were in these boxes; where they just holiday decorations? Winter clothes? Old yearbooks her father kept all these years? Knowing her father, she wasn’t surprised at the fact that he probably kept her old baby clothes in storage too. She continued to scan the room until her eyes met up with a fuschia color box with purple and green paisley designs on it. She took the stool she was sitting on and placed it in front of the mountain of boxes and proceed to take the fuschia box down from its place. Not getting a good enough grip on it, the box falls to the ground, creating a noise loud enough to alert her father. Her dad asks her if everything was okay, and with Grace racing to pick up the box, she said she was fine.

When she heard her father go back upstairs with the made-up boxes, now was her time to look in the fuschia box and see what was so special about this peculiar looking box. In faded out script lettering, the top of the box read “Grace”. Grace noticed the piece of string holding onto a button in front of the box, and she began to unloop it. The box opened and Grace couldn’t believe what she saw: photos upon photos of Grace and her family when she was a baby, baby-sized hair clips and a baby cloth with pink ducks on it. In a little frame Grace notices and picks up, there is a picture of Grace’s mother in a beautiful, shimmery costume holding up Grace when she was just a baby. Grace stares at the photo, wishing she was able to remember this day. She imagines what was happening at that exact moment the picture was taken. She puts the picture frame back in the box and goes through it one more time before putting it back before her father catches her looking at it. Why is this box addressed to me though? she keeps asking herself. Before ultimately giving up, she picks up the box and notices a dangling piece of paper attached to the bottom of the box. Carefully, she flips over the box to read what was on the piece of paper.

Please give her the letter in the picture frame on her 18th birthday. -M

Grace raised her eyebrows, quickly flipping the box back over to get the picture frame from inside. Grace gets the picture frame, turns it around, and notices a little tab on the bottom left corner. She pulls the tab and the back of the picture frame opens. A folded white piece of paper is shown. She takes the paper and unfolds it and begins to read the letter:

My Dearest Grace,

Today is your 18th birthday. You’d be a high-school graduate, a college freshman, and beginning your journey into womanhood. I am beyond proud of you. You managed to go through your childhood and teens, experience life through your own eyes and made it to this special day and this special milestone. I know your strength, independence, spunk, and your passion got you where you are now, and for that, I look up to you now.

When I was eighteen, I wasn’t in the greatest place. For years I held onto demons that carried from my own childhood into my teenage years, and I never knew how to manage those demons until I met your dad. Your dad was always such a positive person. He saw a light in me that I thought went out years before. He showed me I was more than those past demons and past experiences: I was a talented and passionate girl who could strive to do big and better things. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to study in Julliard, I wouldn’t have made it on time to an audition that would change my life forever, and I wouldn’t have had such a beautiful daughter like you.

But, demons are demons for a reason, and I let them decide my fate. 

Grace, wherever you may be at this exact moment, I know up until this moment you may believe I didn’t love you enough or you weren’t good enough for me to stay. The truth is I think about you every single day of my life. I wonder what’s your favorite color. I wonder if your bedroom is decorated in pinks and purples and have a whole vanity full of lipsticks and eyeshadows. I wonder if it’s all-sports equipment. I wonder if you eat Butter Pecan ice cream in bed like I used to as a teenager. I wonder if you’ve found love yet. I wonder if you are anything like me.

Watching you and your father that one night is a memory I think about often. Seeing your eyes full of wonder and excitement; the image is irreplaceable. It was the last night of the season and your first time at one of the shows. Everyone could not stop talking about how cute and bubbly and happy you were backstage. You were mesmerized by all of the shiny gold costumes and you loved looking at yourself in the dressing room mirror. When it was time for my section of the showcase, dad brought you to the little section of the stage where you saw all the dancers dance up close. I remember your dad telling me, “Grace’s mouth was open in pure awe the entire time; she even clapped and went crazy after every dancer performed!” I imagine how happy you were that night. 

I don’t think there will be a time I hope to hear your voice or see your face just one last time. I hope you know my decision years ago had nothing to do with you or your father. I was young, and I was selfish. I can’t turn back time and make the decision knowing now how life turns out, but I can only hope that I could make things right in the future. Of course, the choice is yours.  

Happy 18th Birthday, Grace.

–Mom

Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH!

I wanted to share a story that I feel like I never expressed to the outside world because I always thought that people would look at me weirdly and think I’m awkward and not normal, but I realize that I wouldn’t be the person I am today if this didn’t happen when I was younger.

Long story short: I was one of those kids that had imaginary friends, but not in the way you may think. You see, kids interact with their imaginary friends; they would have tea parties with them, conversations with them, and everyone around them knew that their imaginary friends were present in that child’s life. Those imaginary friends would then vanish once that child began going to school and started making real friends of their own. I always had friends when I was younger, yet I would come home and still imagine these people that I created in my head. My “imaginary friends” never interacted with me, they would interact with each other, like characters in a story. When I got older, I began drawing these characters in notebooks. I started to draw out their everyday lives and began putting them in scenarios that were compelling to my child/teenager self. I mean, granted many of these scenarios involve people being secretly in love with each other because that’s pretty much the gist of a teenage girl, but they still kept me creative and entertained. There wasn’t a moment that I remember where I wasn’t thinking about characters in my head.

As I got older, these characters and their stories began to become more developed and complex because I began to learn more about life and what it really meant to live in it. It wasn’t all about lovey-dovey crushes anymore, but it was about real life situations and butterfly effects. It was psychological damage due to the events of their past. It was going through enough heartbreak in their lives for them to realize what was right in front of their faces. It was divorce, it was marriage, it was about all these different things that can happen in life, and as I got older, they’ve gotten older with me.

At first, many of my “imaginary friends” were characters from my favorite television shows. They had the same traits as the canon ones, but I began to make them my own to fit into the universe that I created. For example, I used Bubbles from The Powerpuff Girls a lot when I was younger. In my universe, she was just a regular girl within a regular family, being the oldest of 4. Nowadays, she resides on the outskirts of the tri-state area with her boyfriend, Cody, and their (almost) three-year-old son, Max. If this still doesn’t make sense, think of it like fanfiction in an alternate, non-canon universe. In the last couple of years, I started developing my own unique characters with complex backgrounds, and one of my favorite characters to go back to and analyze some more is a young girl named Mollie. I first mentioned her in a post back in August called “Stories I’ve Been Working On.” Side note: I’m always working on her. She’s one of those characters who at first was your typical girly-girl with no dimension to her story, but when I got older and started to develop her more, she became this complex creature with layers upon layers. I’ve written my first short film about this character in her future without any of her backstory shown. I remember sharing her for the first time in my short film with my screenwriting class and the entire class had a debate on whether or not you should like Mollie as a character or not because of her background. That’s the shit I live for when creating my characters. It’s the things like that that make me love what I do, and I know I do a hell of a good job doing it.

These imaginary friends I had when I was younger are the reason why I am a writer today. Characters have lived inside of my head for over a decade, their stories have been written down in various different forms such as scripts, musicals, scenes, short-stories and graphic novels. This detail about myself is one that I rarely share because it’s been something that has been a part of me for so long that I forget to mention that this is the way my mind works. If I could write every single story out on paper to remember it, I definitely would (I mean, I remember coming up with some sick ass stories when I was younger and I wish I documented them more efficiently back then). There is simply no time (especially not now) to do so, but I keep a mental note on what and where everyone is at this point in time. I am currently working on a story involving two of my dearest characters I’ve been working with for possibly over a decade (you can read more about them here in this post). The thing I love most about my characters is that they all most likely connect to each other one way or another. They all live in the same universe (besides one set of characters who I created solely for my feature-length film script, The Fire Remains). None of them are supernaturally special or sci-fi related, they are all normal people living normal lives. Those are the type of stories I want to tell: compelling stories about people that you can relate to because they’re realistic. As I developed more and more on these characters, I see just how realistic their lives are and how worthy they are becoming more future scripts and short stories. Maybe this is where my passion for storytelling is going, who knows? What I do know is that this creative outlet I made for myself at a young age is what made me want to study English and writing in college and grad school and make a living off of it.

Who would’ve known a couple of imaginary friends would seal my fate of passion?

-Liz. (:

Hey guys, welcome back to TNTH and welcome back to posting on Thursdays! … not really.

Anyway, I’ve been really wanting to write a scene for you guys to post on “Story-Telling Thursdays”, but I haven’t had the time to do so and granted, I am not going to have the time to start doing it regularly once the school year begins.

That doesn’t mean I don’t stir up some good stories in my head.

I don’t know if I’m the only writer that does this, but I’m constantly walking around and living my days with stories forming in my mind. Hear me out before you call me crazy, but before I commit to writing anything creative down on paper, I let the story idea sit on my mind for a couple of weeks and see where it takes me. Once I feel like I have enough to write about, I actually start working on either a short story version of it or a quick scene of one of the events that happen in that story. I figured it would be interesting to share a couple of story synopsis’ with you guys that personally have been on my mind for the past couple of months.

1.) The “everything comes full circle” Story.

This story isn’t relatively new; in fact, I’ve been working with these group of characters ever since I was in junior high school. These set of characters are always changing in my stories because obviously when you’re younger, you don’t know how real life really is, and you start making up shit that really can’t happen in real life. Like I had these two characters planning this big ass wedding to get married when they were only 16… totally realistic. Like me, these characters grew up, and as I got older, I began to put these characters in more life-like situations like college and living on their own and handling parent’s divorcing and all of that, and in my opinion, these character’s stories are more complex and relatable so that if I ever write the cheesiest trilogy that this story is, people would like these characters more. Anyway, the story revolves around these two platonic best friends (guy and girl) who have known each other ever since they were toddlers in pre-school. They’ve been through thick and thin with one another (one of the major storylines in this story is that the guy BFF had a girlfriend who he had gotten pregnant in high-school and had to raise his son on his own because his girlfriend passed away just weeks after giving birth). They are both 25 years old now, and after the girl BFF was now living in North Carolina, set to marry her college sweetheart this past summer. Unfortunately, he passes away after being in a motorcycle accident. You get where I’m going with the “full-circle” part of this storyline, right? Anyway, it has been months that the best friends have seen or spoken to each other (more complex story reasoning why) and when they both see each other at a mutual friend’s party, everything that was had between them comes coming back full circle. I enjoy working on this story because these characters are possibly the most complex characters I’ve created. Besides their own friendship related problems, they had their own family lives with issues and own inner demons that the other doesn’t know about. I’m excited to see where this story goes, and hey – I might just update you all on that. 

2.) The misunderstood 9-year old girl.

This story is fun to write because it’s sort of like the spin-off version of the top story because – news flash – this story is about the 9-year old sibling of the girl in the previous story! This nine-year-old girl has been getting into a lot a trouble in the last year, and her mother can’t seem to pinpoint the exact reason why she is acting out. She was never a problematic child, in fact, her two older sisters were troublemakers in their childhoods more than she has been. But something switched in this little girl’s life and when she gets into a violent fight with one of her best friend’s bullies (did I tell you that the girl’s best friend is the son of the guy in the first story? FULL. CIRCLE.), she is forced to see a child psychologist every Tuesday after school to help her sort out the issues she may be having. This little girl is quite mature for her age due to the things she’s been going through: the age gap between her and her sisters are literally a decade apart, the middle sister is in college out-of-state, and her oldest sister, the one who moved to North Carolina, was incredibly close to her. Once she “lost” her older sisters, she finds out that her parents are getting a divorce because her father was living a double life (let’s just say he kept his mistress and 21-year old son a secret all of these years). So really, it’s just her and her mother, who is finding it difficult to keep up with her daughter’s bad behavior. I hold his nine-year-old girl close to my heart because she is the only character I work with that was completely shaped and molded by me. A lot of the characters I write about are influenced by childhood cartoons I used to watch or share some of the personality traits that are canon to their respected TV show, so this young girl is entirely my own creation. I pretty much have her entire story written out due to her unique character traits; this young girl isn’t going to grow up being completely fine. Some of her childhood experiences will carry on into her teen years and even adulthood. She’s one of those characters you hate to love because she really tries her best to be good and loving and caring and it’s completely not in her nature. If anything, she resembles the same aura as The Killing’s Sarah Linden, which was unintentional but hey – I enjoy both of those characters.

3.) 2025.

2025 is the year that the girl in the previous story would be a 17-year old teenage girl. Granted I don’t go back to this story often because most of the major points of this story are written. I go back to this story whenever I add something new to the storyline in the second story. I like to see how a decision made in her childhood affects her when she’s older or how she handles certain situations due to her past experiences. Recently, I’ve turned back to this story to add a crucial detail to this girl’s story. In the previous story, I mentioned how every Tuesday, she’s required to see a child psychologist help handle her issues and such, but I never thought about how that storyline plays off when she’s older. As a 17-year old girl, she’s transferred to talk to a regular therapist once a week, but none of her friends know about it. She finds it embarrassing and would rather keep that part of her life hidden from her school life. During all of this, she encounters a boy that she’s crushing on. They hit it off and they get to know each other, but she feels herself being too distant from him because of this “other life” she lives. She wants to appear perfect in his eyes; she’s afraid that her inner demons will chase him away. When she fails to make up an excuse on why she can’t go to a Halloween dance that Tuesday night, he begins to feel as if she’s been lying to him all along. I only got this far into this story line, but I’m definitely trying to have ways find out about this “other side” of hers.

-Liz (: