sábado, 14 de janeiro de 2012

2011

As the world goes round João Pereira keeps with us and sends us his view and contribution:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAIEamakLoY

Being a writer

One day a wonderful person and a wonderful student - Victoria Ayuso shared this text with us:
Being a writer is first of all, being a composer, a composer of dreams and stories; someone who is responsible for bringing dreams and ideas to reality, through a simple thing called pen (or computers, if we are talking of today’s writers).
As to me, being a writer is not and will never be the same as “writing”, I mean, being a writer is something that is born with us, something similar to a gift that was offered to us, it’s something special that requires the magical art of making words follow each other in a piece of paper and, at the same time, like “glued” to those words, draw an invisible painting of dreams, feelings, thought, ideas that will tell the true story that lays behind those words.
On the other hand, if we learn the ABC, a lot of vocabulary and grammar at school, we will obviously be able to write several stories and novels, but that doesn’t mean that we’ll become a writer. Everyone can write a note, a piece of paper, a letter, a story or even a book, but are they writers? Only if they have what it takes, I mean, only if their destiny is to become a writer and in those circumstances, they will certainly have the gift and the talent of being a writer inside them.
Moreover, in spite of being wonderful and a true way of escaping to a different and kind of “personified” world, being a writer is not a bed of roses and every writer will tell you that there’s more to it than meets the eye. Indeed, a writer doesn’t have an easy life, because either we are lucky and become very succeeded, or we will be on the verge of becoming poor, watching our prospects as a writer go down the drain. That’s why, some writers see themselves obliged to find another job (which they can even hate), just to survive, this is, basically, if people don’t like your ideas or stories, you are done, because if they don’t like your books, they won’t buy them, so you won’t sell much.
Nevertheless, some writers don’t really mind and they try (as hard as they can) to live on writing. In my opinion, they do that, because they feel that they were made to write, so their love and passion for writing is so big and important for them, that they can’t fit other jobs. It’s like they were lying to themselves and as to me, someone who lives on selling stories, should never lie, neither to him/her, nor to his/her readers.