I've always thought that writing is a pretty difficult thing to do, it's not easy to be looking at a blank piece of paper in order to put letters in it, and it takes a lot of time to begin thinking of what would be better to write down, your pencil is the only friend you have to create your work and it doesn't come to you with ideas, it is just an extension of your body that your brain uses to project things.
It was not long ago that I started reading novels and tales as a hobby, before that, I used to read them only if I had assignments or some kind of homework to do about them. Everything begun when my cousin wanted me to buy the Bram Stoker's novel: Dracula, she said that reading that novel caused her some serious nightmares, and as a fan of intense experiences I wanted to know how it was to read the book. So I bought it. It wasn't as scary as I thought but I had some gloomy dreams after I read it. It was a little bit annoying that I had to read it with a dictionary on my other hand due to the words that the author used, but despite that it's one of the bests books I've read. After reading Dracula I realized that reading was really fun and it was a lot rewarding because it teaches you a whole world of new words.
I read three more books that year: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Patrick Süskind's Perfume and Tolkien's The Hobbit, that is a good number considering that the previous year I had read zero books.
The next year I read seven books, and next of it I read eleven, last year I read fifteen, all of them novels or tales. The more I read stories, the more I became greedy for them. I had to write papers and laboratory reports almost for every subject in my career back at Colombia, but I enjoyed more to write my own stories in a more opened way so I could express myself and recreate, in my own way, what I had read. Last year's fall I took an elective subject called Literature. They made me write some works, but those weren't like the rest, they were the kind of opened-form writings that I wanted to write, so I enjoyed a lot.
There were two of the works that I made that I really liked, the first one was a made-up chronicle that had to be some kind of lost manuscript written by any person within the crew of Christopher Columbus at any of his voyages to the recently discovered american continent. The second one was the sequel of one of the twelve tales in 'Strange Pilgrims' from our Colombian Nobel Prize: Gabriel García Márquez, the name of the tale was 'The Ghosts of August'. I really enjoyed writing that last one because it was a suspense tale, so I liked the fact that I gave it a cool ending with a horror content.
I won't say that my knowledge about different books is great, because I believe that you have to read several amounts of books in a life to say so, but I've read enough authors to say how I'd like to build my own writing style. I like to use sophisticated words and to place them into a simple context so it's easy to figure out their meaning and to memorize them, I don't like to overuse them because it can be tedious to read, I've adopted this aspect from some writers of yesteryear who have influenced me not just on the structure they use, but also on the words and expressions they tend to put on their works. I also like to enquire in different genres of literature so I can gather a bigger amount of stories every time. Herbert George Wells, Doris Lessing, José Saramago, Gabriel García Márquez, Stephen King, J.R.R Tolkien, Franz Kafka, Howard Lovecraft and even the Marquis of Sade, they could may be very different and have nothing in common, but they have inspired me with their novels and their stories really deeply.
Nowadays I've been working on a thriller novel in spanish, it's been a project that I started last year, encouraged by my father and my sister, they have supported me with this since I told them that one of my biggest dreams would be being the second Nobel Prize for Colombia some day. I'd like people to see me as a great writer of the near future years, I want them to recognize me for my writing and my style.
I expect from this course to help me to improve my writing because, unfortunately, I haven’t written anything in english, just on my native language. I know that, due to my career, most of times I’ll have to write some closed-form writings but I’m also hapily willing to learn how to write them.
