Author's Manifesto

Everything I write is true.
Not always literally. Not always entirely.
But truth runs through every line like blood through a living body.

Some of what you read happened to me.
Some of it happened to someone I love, someone who confessed in the dark, someone who whispered their wounds into my hands and trusted me not to drop them.
Some details are rearranged. Some names are buried. Some circumstances are altered to protect the broken, the guilty, or the dead.
But the emotional core never lies.

There will always be readers who ask,
“Did this really happen?”
“Is this character you?”
“Which parts are real?”

You’re welcome to guess.
You’re invited to dissect, suspect, interpret, and wonder.
You may try connecting my fiction to my life like red thread on a crime board, trying to spot which scars belong to me and which belong to someone else.

But here is the truth you must sit with:

Nothing I write is fiction and everything is.
The only lie is what you think I made up.

I write from memory, survival, and witness.
I write from places I’ve lived, loved, hated, and barely crawled out of.
I write from nights where doors were slammed, from days where people disappeared, from moments where love tasted like honey and poison in the same mouthful.

I write because silence is a grave.
And I have no intention of dying quietly.

My stories are stitched from lived experience
sometimes mine, sometimes another woman's, sometimes a stranger’s confessional that fell into my lap like fate.
If you think a chapter feels too real to be fiction… maybe it is.
If you think a plot feels unreal, impossible, unbelievable… maybe it happened exactly that way.

Humans are unbelievable creatures.
Pain is cinematic.
Love is irrational.
Life is stranger than anything I could invent
so I don’t invent much.

I build worlds from cigarette ash memories, from years Kansas City rained on my shoulders, from men who loved me wrong, from women who fought like demons and prayed like saints. I write Black women as the center of the storm, not the victims of it. I write us loud, complex, angry, sacred, evolving. I write us as the plot, not the side character in somebody else’s story.

My pen does not apologize for its tone.
It does not soften its voice to make anyone comfortable.
I do not water myself down to be digestible.

If my writing burns let it burn.
If you find yourself uncomfortable ask why.
If you recognize yourself sit with that.

You may wonder which characters are based on real people.
You may think you recognize your reflection in the pages.
If it bothers you, remember:
Art imitates life not the other way around.
If you see yourself in my ink, it’s because you walked through my life noisy enough to leave footprints.

Readers will debate.
Some will swear they know which scenes are factual.
Others will think they spot the lies.
Some will doubt everything.
Some will believe every word.

The game is yours to solve
I don’t plan to confirm or deny.

Because my writing is not here to be decoded.
It is here to be felt.

It is here for the woman who keeps her pain quiet.
For the man who thinks he’s the only one haunted.
For the survivor who smiles in public and shatters in private.
For the Black girl who was told she’s “too much.”
For the ones who lost their voice and want it back.

I write for us.

I write like a house on fire
fast, bright, destructive, holy.

I write truth disguised as story.
I write wounds disguised as entertainment.
I write confession disguised as fiction.
I write healing disguised as hurt.

Everything I write is true.
And the only lie is what you think I made up.

If you’re brave enough to read me,
be brave enough to question yourself.

If you want to know which parts actually happened
you’ll have to go find them.

My stories live on the page, in my past, in my people, in the rumors, in the trauma, in the laughter, in the smoke. They breathe. They ache. They testify. They warn. They rebirth. They haunt. They heal. They stand as proof that I lived and I paid attention.

This is my manifesto.
My declaration.
My invitation.

Enter my world at your own risk
and your own wonder.

Because once you start reading,
you’ll never know what’s real.

And I won’t tell you.

By, Dakota Denise