Why do I write?

Each person has a different reason for why they write. I am not referring to the practical reasons for which reading and writing are mandatory skills to learn in most schools. I am referring to the people that do it as a hobby, as a job or as a need.

I want to share my personal reasons and a little bit of my story. Although I just recently decided to fulfill my dream of making a living from writing, as a kid I was fascinated by stories. There were not short stories or texts per se, but when I was young I loved to invent original adventures for my favorite cartoon characters. Almost all were in the way of comics or drawings. I still keep some of those adventures. I used to cut a paper sheet in pieces and each rectangle was like a comic square, with drawings and balloon dialogues; later I stapled them and kept them. From time to time I would read and show them again to myself or to my brother.

The liking of writing as such manifested much later. I do not consider myself a writer, although in reality I do not know when exactly I should call myself one. What I am sure is that I knew I had a talent to write stories with some of the homework I had. It was not common, at least where I studied, but sometimes we had to write short stories. I have two memories that I can recall clearly: in seventh grade we were asked to write an original story, and I wrote one of a boy that found an abandoned laboratory on his way to school, that had a computer that could grant him all his desires; the boy discovers it is true and when he comes back to ask it for everything he ever wanted, he discovers the building was demolished. The teacher commented he enjoyed it very much. Some classmates accused me of copying it from somewhere, which they could never prove since it was a lie. A year later in another class, they asked us to create a fictional story of where some of the letters of the alphabet came from. I was assigned with the letter “C”, so I created a story of a valley inside a crater whose top entrance was narrow, and in some days the moon covered almost entirely and it showed the form of the letter. After that story, my teacher told me there was a writing competition and she would like me to participate. I did, although it was disappointing because it was not a competition of creative writing, but of reading a book from an assigned series and making a summary of it.

Surprisingly, reading was never of my hobbies until I was fifteen or sixteen years old. Writing was also not one of them, even when I enjoyed it and was good at it, at least creatively. It was until high school when I really got into reading and writing. I went through an addiction phase in which I read a book each week, since I had much free time because I did not exercise nor had other extracurricular activities.

When I got to the growing up phase between being a teenager and an adult, where you discover yourself, and you feel unfitting and alone in the world, writing was one of my refugees. Looking back, I did not have half of the problems I thought I did, and I was making a storm in a teacup, but writing helped me get what I was feeling out of me. That was the time when I experimented with poetry, that I still do from time to time.

Now that that phase is long gone, I write because I feel I have too many stories in my head that I want to share with the world. I write because I sometimes do not find other wat of expressing my feelings. It has happened to me, that while writing a letter, an email, a poem, I can feel how my emotions pass to the paper, and my readers can feel them too. It is in those texts where we leave a part of us inserted in the lines. When with each word our eyes get wet.

Giving life to characters, worlds and stories seems incredible to me. Much of the control we do not have in our lives, we can have it by writing. Although from time to time the characters seem to have a life of their own and decide by themselves what they want to do. I also think that each text almost always has a very personal opinion of what we wish to change about the world or our past.

Another reason of why I love writing and any other creative mean, is that I find impressive that there will be no two of the same in the world. Even when they are about the same topics, they have a plot or climax alike, have similar characters, there will never be two exact works. When you write a few lines about anything, it is something unique that will never repeat itself anywhere. For me, it is a treasure that has no equal. That is also why I decided to leave behind the nervousness and pressure behind of sharing my texts with more people. I need to learn to appreciate both positive and negative comments. If there is people that do not like the work of immortal literature geniuses, the same will happen with a mortal writer like me. The important thing for me is to fall in love with my work and be proud of it.

I wanted to share some of my history as an amateur writer. It is a piece of what I am and why I keep writing. I am decided to pursue a dream that I am reaching step by step. Like is too short to not dedicate at least some time to what really makes you happy. And why do you write?

Feel free to contact me for questions or additional comments in: jessav@mail.com.