Alexandra, The Dorky Writer - Chapter 2

This entry was originally posted on my Goodreads blog on February 2nd.

One evening, the Dorky Writer went to a book presentation of a very good friend of hers, The Dragon Writer. Apart from being absolutely proud of seeing her friend flying up to reach out the stars and come back with not one but two of them, she couldn't help herself to feel nostalgic about writing.

Unfortunately, that nostalgia transformed into a heavy, yet invisible monster: Anxiety.

Some years ago, when I was in high school, one of my teachers asked my class to write a story based on the insecurity the city had in that time. I wrote about a girl that had lost her father because of a confrontation between a drug cartel and police. Very cheesy, very Mexican soap opera.

But the teacher loved it and I got a 100 for that month. He even believed that that story had happened to me, but my dad still lives, and breathes, and works... and not as a policeman.

The thing is that that encouraged me a lot when he asked us again to write another thing. I dared and I wrote an even more stupid thing: a play. He didn't like it, by the way. I don't even remember exactly what the story was about, but I do remember the characters' names because they haunted me long enough to the point I decided to write an original story with them. The story had a lot of changes and turns throughout the years. It started as a contemporary young adult story and at the end it became a fantasy one. And the characters' names? Their personality? Still there.

I wrote snippets of that story, edited them, read, rewrote, for around 7 years. It all ended, as a cataclysm though, when I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix. I discovered that the idea that I thought was original actually had some similar parts in that magnificent show. I couldn't continue. For God's sake! I'd even divided my book series (of course it was a book series) in 5 parts! Water, Earth, Fire, Air, and a still-not-named-book. I thought if someone read it sometime, they would accuse me of plagiarism or would tell me that the story, which didn't have an Aang or a Toph precisely there, wasn't original.

Time passed and I started to rewrite for the 1,000,000,000th time. I had to get rid of a lot of things that reminded me of ATLA. And the story changed completely again. This time, the story was actually getting somewhere and I didn't even think about it as a book series, just a single story, so that was good. The bad part is that it just started to happen in my head and couldn't reach a piece of paper, a Scrivener or Word document.

BOOM: WRITER'S BLOCK.

And it hasn't really left my side.

You could say: "Eh, YOU'RE WRITTING NOW!" But I'm a very stubborn person, so I would say: "I'm not writing what I really want and need to."

All of these memories collided and I ended up having a crisis. I told my boyfriend about this and he gave me very good reasons why I could have this problem: "You're holding down, basically, a full time job, going to school yourself, taking care of the house... none of that is gonna be inspirational, so is not gonna flow and you're not gonna have anything to write because you're busy thinking about the other things you do in life." The thing is that, ok, I do have to worry about all of that now, but back then? And then, of course, he said: "You're one of the most self-critical people I've ever met in my life." Good thing you don't live with me yet, handsome ;)

I didn't take that as bad criticism. It was actually a reminder of what a therapist told me years ago. I NEED TO GET MY SH*T TOGETHER AND DO NOT AIM FOR PERFECTION.

"Don't write a book, write effectively a comic but without the pictures. Write other things and just get your creative juices flowing from something else and maybe that will help you with what you actually want to write about," said the handsome wizard. Of course I'm having a handsome wizard as a boyfriend instead of a prince! Once a Potterhead, forever a Potterhead.

Well, I'm not writing a comic, but I've come back to a blog. Y A Y !

And now I need to stop procrastinating and do my homework.

End of Chapter 2.