🔥 THE WRITER’S MANIFESTO OF TRUTH, TENDERNESS, AND TOTAL DEFIANCE 🔥
By Damian Jay Clay
✊ 1. I Write Because Silence Is Complicity
Stories are resistance. Every sentence is a rebellion against forgetting. I write to name what power hides, to remember what erasure buries. I write because if I don’t, someone else will write the lie, and they’ll make it polite. They’ll erase the bruises. They’ll dress up the violence in claims of compassion. I write to stop that erasure. To say: here’s what really happened. Here’s who you tried to forget. I don’t do neutrality. I don’t do permission. I tell the truth loud, even when it hurts. Especially then.
🔪 2. I Write Humour as a Weapon, Not a Soothing Balm
Comedy is not an escape. It’s an incision. I use laughter to cut into hypocrisy, puncture power, and make truth bleed out grinning. I write knob jokes and funeral punchlines because humour lets us breathe in hell. It exposes what polite language can’t. If a fart joke can reveal more than a sermon, I’ll go there every time. I’m not here to soften the blow; I’m here to aim it precisely. If you laugh and feel your chest tighten? Good. That means the knife landed. And more importantly, that means you’re still alive.
💣 3. I Write to Shatter Institutions That Feed on Shame
I name names. Churches that crucify queerness. Schools that punish difference. Courts that call it justice while destroying lives. Religions that murder homosexuals. I write to rip the masks off these machines. I don’t do “good intentions.” I don’t write reform arcs for abusers. I show the survivors. I show the silence. I show the cost. My stories don’t apologise for making you uncomfortable; they make you accountable.
👁 4. Grief Is Not Subtext. It Is the Language
Grief in my stories doesn’t fade. It speaks in cracked voices and dark humour. It leaves teeth marks. I don’t write tidy mourning. I write the kind that won’t sit still. The kind that eats, jokes, screams, and remembers. My characters carry their grief the way people do in real life: messily, beautifully, indefinitely.
🔥 5. Rage Is Not a Flaw. It’s a Compass
Anger in my writing is sacred. It doesn’t need to be justified. It doesn’t need to be redeemed. I don’t ask my characters to be polite while bleeding. I let them scream. I let them burn. Because sometimes rage is the only proof that something sacred was violated, and the only map toward something better.
💔 6. I Write to Hold the Wounded
My characters are not case studies or cautionary tales. They are raw, radiant, complicated people. Kids made to survive wars they didn’t start. Boys who cry. Girls who fight. Queer teens learning to want without shame. I don’t write to fix them. I write to hold them. Tenderness isn’t an afterthought. It’s the point.
🧠 7. Mental Health Is Not a Side Quest
Breakdowns are not aesthetic. Trauma isn’t a subplot. I write panic attacks and depressive spirals with clarity and care, because they are real, and someone needs to feel seen in them. But I don’t just write the dark. I write the recovery. The friend who stays. The voice that says, “you don’t have to go through this alone.”
🌈 8. Queer Is Not a Twist, It’s the Foundation
My stories are gloriously queer. Not quietly. Not tragically. I write queerness as central, holy, horny, hilarious, defiant. I write it as love. As family. As survival. My characters don’t exist to be tolerated; they take up space. They kiss under lightning. They demand joy. And they always, always get the last word.
🧠 9. I Write Neurodivergence as Truth, Not Tragedy
I don’t write autistic, depressive or ADHD characters as quirks or metaphors. I write them as whole. Feral. Sacred. Real. They stim, shut down, misread cues, and survive anyway. They aren’t here to be fixed. They’re here to be loved. My stories don’t demand palatability; they demand honesty. I write the rituals, the overload, the brilliance. I write neurodivergence not just as a trait, but a way of seeing a supernova.
🫀 10. I Write Mess Over Morals
There are no saints in my stories. No villains without shadows. I don’t believe in purity arcs. I write people who fuck up and still deserve love. Who grieve and rage and make it weird. My characters aren’t redeemed, they’re real.
🎸 11. Found Family Is My Architecture
My stories aren’t built on blood – they’re built on choice. On late-night kitchens, rooftop songs, and ride-or-die loyalty. When the world discards you, found family picks you up. I write those bonds as sacred. As shelter. As revolution.
🩸 12. I Don’t Write Closure. I Write Connection
I don’t do clean endings. I do staying. I do surviving. My stories don’t tie things up; they reach out. A blanket. A hand. A voice saying “I’m still here.” Survival is nonlinear. Healing is messy. But connection? That’s everything.
🧵 13. My Craft Is My Blade
I don’t just write with heart. I write with discipline. Structure, pacing, rhythm – these are my scalpel. Because when the story matters this much, the craft better rise to meet it. My dialogue cuts. My chapters carry weight. This isn’t sloppy therapy – it’s precision rebellion.
✨ 14. Magic Is Real, and It Looks Like Care
My miracles don’t fall from the sky. They’re in hugs, in shared food, in hands held after breakdowns. I write magic that smells like peach sorbet and sounds like a gay kid’s laughter. My fantasy isn’t escapism, it’s sacred ordinary turned luminous.
👻 15. I Write Ghosts That Refuse to Be Quiet
My ghosts don’t whisper. They testify. They rage. They crack jokes through the veil. I don’t write them as horror – I write them as memory with unfinished business. My fiction is séance, protest, and resurrection.
🎤 16. I Write So the System Can’t Look Away
I don’t just name abusers. I name the systems that protected them. I write courtrooms, churches, and classrooms not as scenery, but battlegrounds. My fiction forces complicity into the light. It refuses denial. It demands reckoning.
🕯 17. Love Is Not Control. It’s Liberation
In my stories, love isn’t obedience – it’s freedom. It’s mutual care. It’s the refusal to abandon. Whether it’s friendship, romance, or family, love shows up. It holds space. It listens. It stays. And it never asks you to shrink.
🩸 18. I Destroy Authority, But I Champion Expertise
I reject power built on silence, control, or tradition. But I honour the wisdom of those who’ve lived it. The trauma counsellor. The autistic teen. The drag mother. That is truth. My stories burn down false thrones, and build maps from what survives. I see no value in ideology for its own sake, left, right, sacred, or secular. I care about what works. I care about who’s hurting and how we stop the hurt. My writing doesn’t chase purity or dogma. It examines the facts, the failures, and the people caught in between. I want solutions, not slogans. I want repair, not rhetoric. If an idea can’t hold up under scrutiny or save someone’s life, I don’t need it.
🌪 19. I Write Because the Storm Is Still Coming
Fascists still march. Communists demand order. The poor still starve. Queer kids still disappear. But someone’s still loving. Still laughing. Still holding the line. I write because the world is on fire, and someone has to name the sparks, the survivors, the hands reaching through the smoke.
📖 20. I Write Damn Good Stories Because That’s the First Mercy
You won’t get bored. You’ll get swallowed. I write to keep you up at night, to make you laugh through tears, to build worlds you don’t want to leave. I write with precision and devotion, because if I ask you to walk through grief, I’ll walk beside you. I don’t just want to be heard. I want to hold you. My stories carry. My prose cuts and comforts. The truth is brutal. The telling is beautiful. That’s not an accident. That’s the craft.
To conclude:
I write because I must.
To tell great stories.
To name pain.
To hold the broken.
To mock the tyrants.
To feed the hungry.
To resurrect the ghosts.
To laugh like it’s survival.
I write not to conclude, but to ignite.
You’ll see all this in every novel I publish.
If my words disturb, provoke, cradle, or haunt you… Good.
That means they’re alive. And so are you.