Cheyenne Braggs – A Writer who lives for the IMAGINATIVE

The world of fiction can be imaginative. Taking you to places, unlike the ones you see every day and meeting fantastical characters that you can connect to. It’s honestly a silver lining in a rather ordained world. For a little girl in Georgia, it would be the incentive for wanting to create her own imaginative stories. For me, to imagine is to dream. And dreaming, growing up made up my past time daily. But dreaming something doesn’t necessarily mean you could share it with other people unless you wanted to. Yes, it would have been very thrilling to do so but, the insecurities and the anxiety that I held when I was younger held me back from sharing these dreams with other people. I was alone. Communicating with people was hard, and I remember I would sweat and panic when someone would even say hello to me. So, I kept my stories to myself. Sharing wasn’t even a concept to me at the time.

But, even with those insecurities, I found solace in the medium of film. An escape that allowed me to explore all these concepts and stories freely. Finally, I found something that I truly connected with. So, writing my own stories as I’d seen on the television would become an obsessive need for me. Finally, I found a calling to writing stories made for the screen.

But I wasn’t truly alone as I once thought I had my family of course. They were very supportive of me and even helped me thrive as my grandmother, who was a fellow writer herself, helped me through any story I wanted to write. She wanted me to have a voice, and that voice would be through my words and ideas.  These ideas that I want to convey through my words are to give others who don’t have a voice a chance on the screen. Whether they are part of the LGBTQIA community, a person of color, a person with disabilities, or any other person of a minority group. Anyone can be portrayed on the screen because anyone deserves to have the chance to see themselves on the screen. We can change this medium for the better, and I want to be one of the writers in the future that can achieve that. The future should be exciting and innovative, so why can’t we as writers create content that reflects our changing times.

There is an innate drive in all of us to imagine. We just need to see it translated through the screen, and that’s where my dream comes in. In the words of Maya Angelou, “My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.” So, I ask you to continue dreaming and change to the medium of film as we know it. All it takes is a little bit of imagination.