About Writing

I have been writing stories, songs and poems since I was ten years old. That means I have kept a hobby for almost thirteen years. It's by far my most beloved thing to do, so I wanted to share something about it with you. 

I'm not a patient person. I want things done now, not in the next five minutes. This has been a bit of a challenge for me when it comes to writing. I used to be even more inpatient than I am today, so what would happen was that immediately after an idea presented itself, I would start writing it. I was hoping to develop the story as I wrote. I would come up with the names of the characters along the way.

Never happened.

As you can imagine, I eventually got frustrated and didn't finish anything I had started. Occasionally not being able to come up with finished pieces I would give up writing for a few months. I really wish I could go back in time and slap the stupidness out of myself. 

Building patience and learning to take things slow has been the biggest change I've had to do over the last couple of years. I'm still hatching this one idea in my head -been doing so for almost 2,5 years- and I'm still not ready to start writing it. This is the best thing I can do about it, just let it stew. Also, building the characters is very important. Let's say, for example, that I write a story about a 35-year-old man. Without creating a "voice" for the character, there's a risk I'll end up writing about him as if he was me. Get it? I would be writing about myself as a 35-year-old man, he would do things as I would do them, not as he himself should do them. So you can see, it's important to make sure the characters have their own voice, their own characteristics, their own personality. It doesn't matter if you don't agree with the character. If you find yourself in a situation like that, it just means you've succeeded in creating a whole new person. 

Writing can be overwhelming, no matter what you write. Sometimes you can find yourself so deep in it, that the problems in your imaginary world become problems in your real life. There's a saying that goes something like this: You'll know you're doing great at your job when your personal life is going down the drain. No matter how much I love to write, I'll try to maintain a sense of reality of some kind :) Sometimes I do live in my own little world, but it's ok, they know me here. 

I've been writing since I was ten. Does it make me a professional? No. 

But I'm not a rookie either.

P.S. One new reader! Welcome! :)