The Manifesto on How to be Interesting by Holly Bourne Read Free Book Online

words, and why.
    She stopped on Stephen King. Alcoholic and drug addict. So intent on self-medicating his demons he still can’t remember writing some of his most famous stories…just stuffing tissues up his nose to stop blood dripping onto his typewriter. And yet it was his words that conquered those demons. Writing about them was vanquishing them. His stories mending him, word by word, page by page, until his blood was clean again.
    Next was Jane Austen, her favourite. Bree took out her battered copy of Pride and Prejudice and leafed through the pages. It was all biting social satire. Jane flicking literary spitwads at the world of romance and marriage, a world she was never invited to join herself.
    And finally there was Virginia Woolf. Whose brain composed words of such brilliance, and yet tortured her with such darkness that she filled her pockets with stones and wandered into a river.
    Pain, loneliness, darkness.
    Bree’s three favourite writers; Bree’s three most present emotions.
    And yet, on her bookcase, all that remained of her heroes’ torments were their stories and their words. If Bree could write, if she could write interesting things that people wanted to read, she too could be immortal. Her pain too could be worthwhile – transformed and transfigured into the redemption of A Good Story.
    She just needed something good to write about.
    She opened her desk drawer and took out her latest rejected manuscript. She sat down and read the opening few lines.
    Rose didn’t know why she had come to the pier but the black waters had coaxed her here with their tidal magic. She knew the water would consume her eventually. She couldn’t fight its intoxicating force. Misery. It would claim her misery. Wash it away and make her clean again. Jumping was the inevitable conclusion to this visit. She knew that, the pier knew that, the water definitely knew that. But before she jumped she needed to understand her pain and why it had brought her here.
    Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was her teacher’s words. Or maybe it was the countless rejection letters. But something finally clicked in Bree.
    This. Was. Terrible.
    Laughably terrible.
    Hysterically laughably terrible.
    A snort escaped her nose. A hiccup popped out of her mouth. She reread it again, chuckling to herself. The chuckles turned to hysteria and soon she was laughing so hard she was almost crying. She flopped back on her bed, sinking into the pillows, and let the giggles bubble from her mouth. They sprang through her body until she was hiccupping instead of laughing. High on the hilarity, Bree rolled over and rummaged in her school bag to retrieve her notebook and pen. She turned onto her belly and sucked the end of the biro.
    She knew what she had to do.
    Her writing was scrawled, messy from the red-wine haze. But the plan was clear. It lay before her, a path waiting to be walked.
    How to become interesting…
    She wrote several bullet points, the rules she needed to follow – scribbling some out, rewriting them, until the list was complete. Then she turned on her laptop.
    Bree signed up to a blogger platform. It was unexpectedly easy to pick a wallpaper, a domain name, and get ready to post. She just had to write and click – then she would be a published writer. Online, anyway. She took a bite of her Pop-Tart and, before she lost her nerve, Bree began to type.
    THE MANIFESTO ON HOW TO BE INTERESTING
    Hello.
    I EXIST. I EXIST. I EXIST. I EXIST. I EXIST. I EXIST. I EXIST.
    Isn’t this what blogging is all about? Proving our existence? Leaving a tiny crap mark on the world so when we die it doesn’t all seem so horribly pointless?
    Good evening, reader. You are reading a loser’s blog. That’s right. I’m a massive loser. If you go to school with me, you won’t know my name. If I walked past you in the street, you wouldn’t even notice. If you talked to me, I would have nothing of any interest