Young Writers Society

The subject of the letter is what my writing process was for my screenplay about masculinity and what I've learned about masculinity now after I've written the screenplay. Please critique because this will be sent in with my submission and I'm really trying to win it. Thanks to all that help me.

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Dear Scenarios USA,

I am Abbey White, a biracial, 16-year old female from the district of North Collinwood in Cleveland, Ohio. I live in North Collinwood with my mother, a single parent of the Caucasian race, in a small two bedroom home. I’m in the 11th grade and this will be my first year attending the Cleveland School of the Arts, also known as CSA. I was previously enrolled on scholarship for seven years at Hathaway Brown School, a private, all girls, college preparatory school in Shaker Heights, Ohio. You may be asking yourselves why I am telling you all of this because most of this information may seem irrelevant to how you judge my writing. However, all of the information I have just shared with you is very important for you to know because every bit of it affected my personal views on masculinity and how I wrote my play.

I have grown in up a world where stereotypical definitions of people are a norm. My mother, being a female single parent, is and has been seen as others as a woman who made very bad choices when she was younger. My father, who does not live with me, falls into the classic black male definition of being an irresponsible man. I, because of my mother’s race, have been perceived as a “white” black, or a person of African American descent who acts and appeals to the Caucasian community. The neighborhood I have grown up in probably isn’t the safest area, so many have defined my life as being filled with drug busts, prostitutes, and drive-bys. Since my previous school contained many of the upper class, I was seen as the poor ghetto child who was trying to escape a life of strife. These misinformed definitions have reappeared constantly through body language, assumptions in conversations, and small, but painful events all of my life.

Something changed this year when I chose to attend CSA and major in creative writing. You see, the day my creative writing teacher presented this contest to our class, I knew that getting around the definitions that everyone had already had for me would be near to impossible, regardless of whether or not they were close to the truth. I did, though, see a chance to break away from the rest of society and not only show people what definitions they have created for and about each other, but to try and help scratch out those definitions all together. This new found hope suddenly changed the way I saw other people’s definitions about me. To me, they no longer seemed like cruel definitions, but as simple and easy ways to understand me, without ever having to ask a single question about me. I took this new found understanding as a challenge to when writing my play. I was not only going to try and unmask the stereotypes found in masculinity, but to unmask the stereotypes about people just like me.

Before I began to write, I looked up what the dictionary definition of masculinity was because I wanted the technical definition that had been created for it to work off of. I then brainstormed all of the ways people interpret that definition in their everyday lives. This included academics, sports, extracurricular activities, and many other things. I then connected these interpretations with the people who I thought were most affected by them. I’m sure a lot of the writers who submitted work most likely based their work off of their own personal experiences, but I haven’t really had a basis for masculinity at all. The only parent in my household is a woman, my grandfather died when I was very young, a lot of the males in my neighborhood are not very good influences, and as I stated before, I attended an all girl school for seven years of my life. Male influences in my life have been close to none. So, when I was trying to create a scenario in which masculinity was involved, I had to think about more than just masculinity. I had to tie in personal ideas and my own experiences with my struggle against definitions to aid me with my writing.

My mother always told me that there were two kinds of people in the world, jerks and non-jerks, and everyone falls into one of those two categories. Because of this, this is how I’ve seen people, regardless of their sex, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion, and economic status. This view of people hasn’t changed, so I decided to use this to help get my point across a little more. When creating my characters, I wanted to purposely stereotype their actions and words. This way, people would be thinking about their definitions right off the bat. But instead of having the stereotyped personalities match the stereotyped physical image, I changed their out appearances to things that weren’t ever in people’s definitions. I did this for two reasons. One, I wanted to grab peoples attention so that they would stay focused on the story. And two, I wanted to show my audience who unrealistic and biased their definitions are. By doing this, I hoped that I could get people thinking about whether or not these definitions were really worth believing in.

Like I’ve said before, I’ve never really had masculine influence in my life, so I had to use my own experiences with how masculinity has affected those around me to help create my plot. Essentially, I was telling their story. I thought about all of the people that I know have been affected by masculinity and how they were perceived. I know males in the performing arts, gays, lesbians, athletes, all males, and all females have been changed by masculinity. Once I did this, I began to write until the story I was trying to tell was told.

Looking back on this experience, I’ve realized something about myself. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to tell people to stop defining me without knowing me. But after writing this play, I’ve found that telling people isn’t enough. It’s not enough because me telling them something is just like telling them another definition, and they would rather save time and stick with their old one. I’ve learned that if I can show them their definitions with the modifications I’ve made through my script, maybe they’ll see that the definitions society has for them are not set in stone and they might just toss out their definitions of things such as masculinity. And maybe, just maybe, those few facts about me that I wrote at the start of this letter won’t be definitions of who I am, but rather small bits of me that will make a person want to get to know me better.

Sincerely,

A. White