Freedom, stories and happiness

Vast subject, but I’ll try to make it short!
Let's start from the fact that you, reader or author, live, just like me, Gabrielle Dubois, in a society in which, theoretically, we can live, think and act freely. The question that I asked myself and that I ask you is: Do you really act as the free person that you are?
‘Of course, I do!’ will you answer me, sure of yourself, sure to think according to your goodwill, to your conscience ... and maybe you are, in this case, great, I’m happy for you!

As far as I’m concerned, I must admit it took me years before allowing myself to have a free thought. I had first to free myself from my childhood, and only those who had to free themselves from it and have succeed, know how difficult and long it is to do it.
First you have to realize that you are locked inside yourself, whatever the reasons, I won’t give you mine here and now - if one day, a distant day, I think that my personal story can be of any use, perhaps I’ll write it, if I have the courage and the daring.
Then you have to expose and get rid of the stuffy parts of your past, and that, however painful it may be!
And the third step is to make peace with oneself and eventually with some others.
After all this, you enter a kind of convalescence during which you get used to living with your new self.
Finally, after a few years, you finally feel free and God it’s so good!

‘Alright,’ you tell me, ‘but what’s this freedom? And what did you do with it?’

Apart from the happy repercussions that this new self had on my children then still babies - babies who are now happy students! - I used this freedom to finally reveal who was the being who was hidden deep inside me since ever.

How?
I wrote the beautiful stories that I have been telling myself for as long as I can remember. I started writing my first story one night, suddenly, as I was about to watch, along with my husband, another film written, directed and played by men; the kind … male hero saving the world. And then, I said to myself:
Enough is enough! I never liked that kind of stories. I'm going to write a story that I love, a story about a woman, the one I've been thinking about for so many years, the one I'd like to see on screen. A heroine who would speak to me, woman, spectator, reader.
So, every night, I settled in front of the family computer, because I had to earn a living during the day! and a year later, a first novel was born, which has since appeared in English version: Mistress Mine.

Why did I choose the novel format?
Because a novel doesn’t have the constraints of verses and rhymes of the poem, neither the constraint of a limited number of words of the short story.
A novel is free to be short, long, poetic or raw, historical or futuristic, talking about love or passion, adventure or inner drama. A novel is flexible: the novelist adapts it to his temperament, the reader chooses it according to his personality.
Just like the storyteller's imagination, a novel is limitless, unless ...

Unless the storyteller listens to publishers who want calibrated novels .
Unless the storyteller lets himself be influenced by fashion that would condemn him to such or such a genre.
Unless the storyteller listens to wise people who will tell him that his novel is too short or too long, too descriptive or with too many dialogues, that it lacks characters or has too many ...!

But …

But if the storyteller ignores all the benevolent or not influences around him, then the storyteller is sincere with himself, then he is free. Then the storyteller has happiness to write and the reader has happiness to read his stories.

Warning ! I don’t mean that the storyteller shouldn’t listen to some good advice on his writing, I only say that his story must remain untouched by any outside influence.

Ah, I can already hear you, reader, telling me: Are you sure you were free in your writing?
I am sure and I will tell you why.

To write freely, may seem easy in a society that is said to be free, but it is not so obvious.
To write freely is: To write not for twenty scholars neither for all the readers of the world, but for those who are eager to read a good story.
To write without worrying about what one will say, about an official or unofficial morality.
To write without constraining oneself to insert into one’s history a complacent subject of society or fashion.
Finally, to write with complete freedom, it is to tell with sincerity the story which one has in his heart ... and that’s what I did!

Gabrielle Dubois©

link towards Goodreads

The future is female