The Story of A Boy

A story about my own life

Life is a chain of events that vary from a person to another. The only sentences that all people without exception share are birth and death. These events can be joyful, sad, funny, awkward, scary, or even embarrassing. They can make the living person experience tons of feelings and emotions. These emotions produced by the daily events happening in life are what creates the personality of the human being. Reactions to the experiences that life is providing differ from a person to another, depending on what other experiences they lived through. This may seem ambiguous, but let me share with you a little story, that is going to help you get clearly what I am talking about.

It’s a story of a boy, when he was born, he was a blank page. He didn’t know any emotions or feelings. The first thing he ever felt is breathing the air, then he felt hungry, and maybe along with that he also felt the warmth or the cold. These are just feelings that helped him to stay alive, he didn’t know emotions yet. After the first days of his birth, he started experiencing his first emotions. The most affecting one was the warmth of his mother, the feeling of being loved and not separating with your loved one. He started knowing family, which represented his whole world in his first few years. As long as he was with his family, this boy was happy. He started going to school, and he made his world a little larger, since he added classmates to it. Contact with other kids made him discovers new feelings and emotions. He made friends, as well as enemies. This kid didn’t care about enemies, he just ignored them. But friends, friends meant a lot to him. As days passed, he knew that friends come and go. The loss of some friends made him sad, but the gain of other ones made up for it. This discovery, that friends don’t last forever, pushed him to look for someone that can last forever, a friend different from the others. He reached his objective. He found a stranger, that became a classmate, his kindness and sense of humor made them friends, and finally, all the things they had in common made them best pals. The kid knew true happiness. Whenever he was with his best friend, he couldn’t stop smiling; he enjoyed his time to the point that he didn’t even feel it passing. The poor kid thought that their friendship was going to last forever; that he was going to be happy until the end of the time. But, dear lord, life was having some other plans for this innocent little kid. One day, he was enjoying going home with his friend by his side. In the blink of an eye, going home became going to the hospital. In the blink of an eye, joy became sorrow. In the blink of an eye, smiles became cries. In the blink of an eye, destiny took away the life of the planned to be friend that lasts forever, and took with it all the hope, the happiness, and the dreams that poor little boy had. This major event influenced the personality of the kid, it defined who he is, and left a mark on his soul. The poor kid had his first sad experience in life, and he hoped it will be the last; he even tried to put an end to his life to make it so. Days, months, and years passed, and the cheerful kid with a bright smile became a lonely teenager who didn’t want to make friends. People that met him always thought that he was strange, that nobody would enjoy his company, without knowing that some years before; there was a person who did. He never wanted to open up to someone and tell him about his life. Or maybe, he couldn’t find someone who would listen to him and not laugh at his struggles or tell him to go see a doctor. Maybe he had to see one, but he was never able to tell all what’s on his mind to anyone but himself, not even his parents. The cursed teenager was suffering from depression, he didn’t understand the meaning of life, he wasn’t even sure that his life had one. Maybe the destiny made a mistake and it was his soul that was supposed to be taken to heaven. Some nights, when he’s alone in his room, he starts thinking about a reason to live for, about some source of motivation that could make him enjoy his boring days. Even tears couldn’t relieve his pain. He thought that his life was meaningless. The teenager even channeled all the courage he had, and he started telling some of the closest friends to him about all what were on his mind; he didn’t have a lot of these close friends by the way. Even opening up to people didn’t help him feel better. In order to not feel sadness anymore, he had to know that c’est la vie, and some people are less lucky than the others, as simple as that. More years passed, and the teenager became a young man. His unstable temper turned into wisdom and maturity, and he finally understood that life is hard, and he had to be strong in order to get the peace of mind that he wanted. So he became strong. He wasn’t able to make best friends because he was afraid of losing them, now he made a lot. He never loved a girl because his heart was too weak to feel love, but now he’s in love. Sometimes, though, he starts thinking that he will lose everyone he loves, and that he’ll become a lone wolf again. But these thoughts don’t last in his mind as long as they were when he was younger. He used to get these depressive thoughts for weeks or even months, but now they don’t last more than a couple of days at most. This boy that the story is talking about started as a baby with no feelings, grew up as a kid and knew what friendship is, along with the sadness and frustration of losing it, became a teenager who suffers from loneliness and depression, and finally transformed into a wise young man. I don’t know what he will become next, but I am sure he will write and tell us about it, because he really enjoys writing. It represents his only resort to be honest and speak up his mind.

The reason that I wrote this story is to show you that we don’t choose all the events that happen to us during our life. Sometimes, we find ourselves forced to live something that we don’t want to. These kinds of experiences are what make us who we are, because at birth we are all the same. So, the next time you see someone you don’t like, maybe you should think about what made him that way before judging, because that person could’ve been you. People can’t choose their destiny, but they can choose how to face what it provides. And to be fair, life can be cruel sometimes.

HATIM Yahia, February 25th, 2016

Author's Note

This is my first time sharing one of my writings in a public place, I hope I can get some reviews :)

Reviews

[JayG]

You want critiques, not reviews. A review centers on like and dislike, and why. A critique focuses on what the problems are and how to fix them.

The first problem is lack of spaces between paragraphs makes it hard to read. Sites like this strip out the indentations, which means you have to double your paragraph marks and provide a white space between paragraphs

But that aside, you're writing this like an essay, and focusing on facts and information. But do you read to learn the details? Or do you hope to be entertained by being made to live the story in your mind as you read, moment-by-moment?

it's being entertained, of course. History books inform, and how many times have you turned to one for light reading? So by personally telling the story, and talking about the story, you're placing yourself between the reader and the actual living character, who is focused on the moment he calls "now," not on an overview of events.

You're treating this like something the reader can hear as they read, but only you can hear the emotion in your narrative voice. Only you can visualize the events as you read. The reader gets none of the emotion in your voice. They don't hear the intensity, the pauses for effect, the whispers and the shouts. In other words all the audible things that makes listening to a storyteller fun are missing.

But there's more. they also can't see the emotion in your performance. No facial expressions. No gestures. And no body language.

'So what does the reader get? Words spoken in a monotone, at a rate determined by the punctuation, so all the nuance of the performance is missing. Have your computer read the story aloud and you'll hear what the reader does.

In other words, you're telling a story, verbally, in a medium that doesn't support sound or picture—just as every one of us does when first we turn to writing our stories because it's the only way we know. And, of course, no one told us that the writing techniques we learned in school are nonfiction skills meant to inform—fact-based and author-centric—not the emotion-based and character-centric skills of writing fiction for the page. And THAT is what you need to work on.

Fiction for the page is a specialized skill, and it's techniques are used almost exclusively by our profession because our medium requires it, just as writing for the screen, the stage, and verbal storytelling have their own skill-sets.

The good news is that it has nothing to do with good or bad writing, talent, or the story. The tricks of the trade are the learned part of the profession—the process. Definitions change from other writing forms, as does organization of the story, which is why films and books of the same story are so different.

So set some time aside to learn and practice the skills the pros take for granted. They're easy enough to acquire, and the cost is low—free if the library's fiction writing section has the book you seek on the basic nuts-and-bolts issues of writing.

As always, my personal suggestion is to seek the name Dwight Swain, Jack Bickham, or Debra Dixon on the cover.

And one more thing: hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greensteion
jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/

[Scheherazade]

The rather astute and well written critique below has said pretty much everything I could. There's some real potential here and an eloquence when it comes to talking about emotion. You just need to master translating that into emotive language utilised by a character in a fictional essay. But I think you've got it in you to do something really great so hang in there and keep writing! That's really the only way any of us have a chance or hope!