Writers Lab: The Manifesto

Happy Friday! We have several new Lab Coats this week, welcome, welcome to the Writers Lab! Be sure to introduce yourselves here, so we can welcome you officially. You can choose whatever lab coat pleases you, one size fits all, be as artistic as you like (mine is tie-dyed), roll up your sleeves, and let’s dig in. We have a great Assignment this week. Thanks for joining us!

Also a note to Founding Members (O Pioneers!): we are wrapping up the summer critiques and consultations this month. If you are wanting to sneak onto the schedule for some one-on-one work with me and your own writing, please reach out to our OpsGuru Zach at ops@deborahwiles.com.

I took this photo in 2008 on a research trip for Countdown. I’m at Camp Springs Elementary School in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where I went to school. It was a senior center in 2008, but same blue curtains and stage as when I was a kid there in the Sixties. I walked behind the curtains to see if the bookshelves and books were still there. I knew they wouldn’t be, but I wanted to see that space again.

When I was a kid reading through the library stacks at Camp Springs Elementary School (like Franny in Countdown), stacks that were on bookshelves that lined the stage, the stage that was in the cafeteria, behind heavy blue curtains, the stacks that held books that had those card-stock sleeves pasted to the inside back cover, with a lined card in the sleeve that you’d slip out and sign your name to (and see who had signed it before you), and then get the card stamped by — who? the librarian? I don’t remember a librarian, I think it was our teacher who came with us to the library at the back of the stage — anyway, stamped the card with the date that you needed to bring the book back by… what a long sentence. I will begin again.

When I was a kid, I didn’t realize that human beings wrote books. I didn’t think at all about how stories came to be written, and I didn’t much care who wrote the stories I read, as long as the stories were there, somewhere, in the school library, or in the base library at Andrews AFB in Maryland/DC… I was after Story. I wanted to be transported.

There came a time when I did look for a particular author, who turned out not to be an author at all, or even a real person: Carolyn Keene. “She” wrote the Nancy Drew books I began collecting. I had no idea that there were multiple authors of Nancy Drew mysteries… and if I had known this, I doubt I would have cared. I was still after Story. (Now that I think about it, Nancy Drew books were a marvel of branding, eh? One author, a specific/same look to each book, affordable and easy to spot, reliable formula for young readers, etc etc.)

It didn’t occur to me that I could be a writer. In those early sixties years, in my mostly white, middle-class neighborhood, I saw women who were mothers, teachers, nurses, and that was about the extent of it, until I took nine years of French and my mother said, “Maybe you’ll be an interpreter at the UN!” (So, of course, Franny thinks she may be an interpreter at the UN as well.)

At some point I did understand that humans wrote books, that many women were writers and authors, but I was well grown before that knowledge sunk in in such a way that I connected with it, even though I wrote like crazy in school, starting with reports (because I liked them!) and then stories for my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Adler, who was the first teacher to insist we write something creative every week.

Camp Springs, Maryland, left to right: me, my sister Cathy, and my next-door neighbor, Gale. I’m wearing Franny’s Buster Brown shoes and her headband. Got my hair in a ponytail like Ruby Lavender. And I’m wearing Comfort’s orange shorts.

I was not popular in school. I was plain and awkward and uncoordinated (probably like everyone else, but who knew that, then). But the first thing I wrote in Mr. Adler’s class got a huge, genuine laugh when I read it out loud, and from that moment, I was hooked on wanting to repeat this phenomenon.

Still, I would be in my twenties before I realized that the newsletter I wrote for the construction company where I worked, and the letters I had spent so many years writing to friends by hand, and the recipe cards I filled out with little stories about that cake or these biscuits and stacked carefully in a wooden box, and all those books I read in all those stacks for all those years, were preparing me for real work that I loved.

I wanted to write. And I knew, to my bones, that this awkward and uncoordinated kid who was all heart as well as an expert over-thinker, felt more suited temperamentally to a writing life than any other endeavor she thought about pursuing, even “interpreter at the UN.”

The Moment

I remember the day this realization came home to me. I remember where I was sitting, I remember getting out the pad of paper and a pen and putting my name and the date at the top of the page: Debbie. 1-25-79.

I was 25 years old. I wrote a manifesto. I had no idea that’s what it was. I just wanted to DO something with this feeling I had so suddenly: I knew what my work was. And, as totally vague as it was in that moment, I needed to capture the wave of realization that was being born in me, revealed to me, right then and there — an epiphany! (I have made myself laugh, but you know what I mean — YES?)

The Manifesto

Who here has not had an epiphany about something, anything, major or minor, many epiphanies. It’s how we grow. (Well, it’s one way.)

I still have this piece of paper. I stapled it to one of those tabbed notebook dividers for a three-ring binder… I must have put it in a binder then, but I don’t remember that. I just remember sitting on the stairs in the first house I ever owned, a townhouse, after years as a single parent who moved often, in order to stay ahead of the landlord. I was newly married (again) at 24 with two small children who were upstairs sleeping, as was my new husband of nine months, and I was sitting on the stairs, writing this epiphany, my notebook in my lap.

I’m going to share my manifesto with you. You’ll see all the hubris of a 25-year-old who suddenly wants to set the world on fire because she just “knows.” lol.

I’ll put it in THE ASSIGNMENT this week, both because it’s intimate and I’m wondering if I might feel sheepish to have it publicly out there (but oh how young I was!) and because — mostly because — I’m going to ask you to write your Manifesto this week.

A Manifesto is a kind of Vision Statement. I’d like you to write it before we get to Core Values next week, as the manifesto will reveal those core values as well. We’re doing the foundational work here that we’ll pull on for all future assignments, and by summer’s end, we’ll be raring to go with lots of exciting writing to explore.

Something I marvel at, as I read this 45-year-old, handwritten manifesto is: I wrote about what I still believe in my heart of hearts is why I write today. Writing the manifesto has held me steady through so much thick and thin, even when I didn’t look at it for years and years — even when I thought I’d lost it. Recovering it gave me a start: a Wow! At heart, I still believe these things. I am just (I hope) more mature today, more tempered, more realistic… about some things.

But the heart of who I am as a writer and why I write is held in my manifesto.

I know it will be in yours as well. So let’s get to it. I have some directions for you below in THE ASSIGNMENT.

If you’re reading this and want to join us in the Writers Lab this summer, you can join here, for a month or more, your choice… we are a friendly and supportive bunch of Lab Coats who work alone or together, share or don’t share, and who appreciate a good cake recipe. (Someone is behind in the cake making, but I will remedy that soon — it’s just so hot right now.)

Links for you, if you’re just joining us: This post is part of the Storybelly Summer Project 2025 in the Writers Lab. We’ve been working for two weeks now on vision statements in the Storybelly Writers Lab, and for the two weeks before that on mission statements… you can find all of these posts here. If you want to join the lab, you can work at your own pace (we all do) and in any order; drop in anytime.

THE ASSIGNMENT:

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