let me tell you before we start that this might not be your regular update, so if you are in search of another depressing short story i would recommend you to wait until next week.

the reason this i've decided to publish this little essay of mine is because last week i started working on my first full-lenth novel and while i wasn´t working on it i was re-reading my old stories that i had been publishing here. i certainly belive a lot has happened since it all begun back in november 2018 and as i was reading them all over again i could only feel how incredibly serious i had been taking myself and my work. i really don't know why after every line i just felt that pretentiousness coming out of it, me beliving i was the next Raymond Carver or John Cheever while in reality i was just another amateur writer taking himself too seriously.

the thing is that lately i have been going to what i consider to be a 'writer's block' mixed with a good quantity self doubt, thinking if my work is really what you could call 'good'. i remember when i was a kid and really didn't cared if what i was doing was what you could call 'literary'. i used to write about all kinds of stuff, from a demonic videogame console to a zombie shark, but there was a moment when i started reading what you could call the classics. i read authors like George Orwell, Don Delillo, Franz Kafka and Thomas Pynchon and i somehow started trying to replicate the best i coud their work. the plots became more serious, the characters more dramatic and the writing more artsy. even if before my writing was bad and quite cheesy, it was quite fun working on them, but after that change on mindset it all became simply tedious, trying and trying to achive writing a work of so-called genious. 

it became harder and harder to work because i always thought that if it wasn't at the level of those books it meant that it wasn´t good (wich really was most of the time). this all ocurred during the early months of 2018 and you could see the change on my writing in stories like 'stranger than fiction', a story that basicly claimed that all fiction that wasn't like 'ulysses' or 'gravity's rainbow' was mediocre and that writing serious literature was the right way to go. enter november 2018 and me publishing my first story. perhaps it wasn´t as pretentious as my later work but it still showed that growing distaste for genre literature, wich is quite ironic taking into consideration that in tapas the most popular novels are obvious examples of genre fiction, filled to the brim with fantasy, sci-fi and BL (do i need to say more than look at the three most popular novels on the website?).

during the last week i have been thinking about what it means writing to me. i'm not saying that all writing should be easy to classify, stereotypicial genre literature, but not also complex, completely bereft of all kind of fun, disgustingly full of itself, postmodernist writing like i have been doing for the past months. i sincerely belive all it's mostly about balance. don't treat your work like it's just easy to make and unoriginal fast food but also don't think of it as the next heartbreaking work of earth-shattering genious. write whatever makes you happy but also try to become better in this beautiful artform that is called writing.

so, lesson of all of this: write what makes you happy but write something that makes peopla think, make people feel, make them connect with each other. as for me, i'll probably try changing my ideology a little bit and try to write what makes me fell alive. probably start all over againg what i had from my first novel and as a fellow writer of mine teached me: it's not really the story, but who tells it.