I am not native in English. My mother toungue is Spanish. I hate almost everything about my country. Probably this has nothing to do with my writing but I put here as an excuse for me writing so bad. But who knows maybe it’s the cause. My dream is to become a writer one day. The day has come to give it a try, a couple of days after turning 40.
Fact: No one, except my mother, has praised my writing (in Spanish). My wife admits I write “ok” sometimes, but not many. I know I can make. I have traced those rare occassions. I know something is happening because a flow possess me and the re-reading is fun and fluent. But that hasn’t happened in my life more than a handful.
The rest of people I know, simply keep quite about my writing. Probably they don’t want to hurt my feelings. Their silence sucks anyway.
I realized something was wrong with my writing because I never got good grades on papers I thought I had done a great job. Maybe I was aware I wasn’t doing great but rather conflated the amount of time I invested writing (always a lot) and the quality of the writing. The premise of my illusion was (and probably still is): the quality of the outcome is proportional to the amount of hours I spent trying to organize my thoughts in writing and polishing and re polishing (most of the times the first paragraphs only).
My premise has proved wrong.
When friend dare to comment about what is wrong what they say is that I stuff an excessive amount of ideas together, making the reader get lost (probably bored, no one is going to torture herself believing I am the new Hegel trying to decipher my thoughts) . My explanation for that, is that I have too much to say and that I don’t want the reader to think my thought process was incomplete.
Enough with lamenting. I know something. Most of the time I am proud of my thinking. I think I have cool ideas, I dare to say they are deep. I get things and can have abstract conversations about the meaning of existence. Another fun fact about me, is that I consider myself (openly) an existentialist. All this said the truth remains: my writing sucks.
The many times people have politely shared with me their frustration with something I have wrote, all still stick in my head. One person was quite succint, “Do you know what ‘cryptic’ means?”. She had paid me to write a summary on some jurisprudence. Without expecting an answer she wrote a check and paid me for my ‘cryptic’ work. As you can tell, she only hired me once.
Because most of my failure has been in Spanish and the only time I have received a possitive comment on my longed activity came from a teacher at Harvard, I am starting this blog in English. On it I will write about anything. I am taking this online course by Malcolm Gladwell on writing. Maybe it will help.
Following the advice from The War of Art I will write everyday. Maybe my dream comes true and if it doesn’t I can’t say I never tried.
Vessel 