Is it difficult to write a book?

 I don’t know how other writers put their writing in motion, but I find it easier to write when I’m reading a book that I love. I can’t read a book for longer than a couple of minutes without feeling the urge to stop and write at my own book. Reading is a powerful trigger for my writing. It will always be. Most of the writers are procrastinators, but I found that reading can break this curse. Each of us has our own story of why and how we postpone the inevitable, which is our writing time. It happens to me as often as it happens to others and some of the reasons may be one of the following:

 

1.      I feel I don’t have the right mood for digging deeper into my story or into my characters’ minds.

2.      I feel I don’t have the right location to put me in that mood.

3.      I feel that my mood is responsible of my writing quality and if something is not right about it I avoid writing.

4.      I feel I can be more productive if I do it later in the day. When I wake up in the morning, I feel I can do it better in the afternoon, and in the afternoon, I feel I can do it better in the evening. I can easily get trapped in this circle for a day or two or sometimes longer.

5.      I feel I’m empty. I feel I have nothing to say. I feel that I have to struggle to create a new scene or a decent dialog. But it’s just an illusion. Writers could never stop being creative.

6.      I feel I will write something I’ll be embarrassed of, something that will lack substance and make me feel I’m not as good as I expect to be. I’m afraid that a bad writing would kill my confidence, so I just wait for the right moment, which in normal circumstances will never come.

 

         Fortunately, something works for me in my fight against procrastination. Everything falls back into place when I pick up the book I’m currently reading. I need to have a reading in progress if I want to break the procrastinating spell. The moment I start reading from that book I feel reconnected to the flow of energy and inspiration a writer needs in order to get started. The more I read, the more I feel like writing, until a sudden urge takes control of my inner self and gets it channelled to the next step. I stop reading, sometimes mid-sentence or mid-paragraph, and get all my fingers back on the keyboard. I’m back again to my own story ready to give it the best of me. The words are pouring down like a rainfall and I could sense a presence of something greater than me taking control. A secret gate is opening and everything makes sense. My confidence gets stronger with every word that I use and every sentence that I put together. Somehow, the book that I read gets connected to the book that I write and the flow of energy that moves inside my body is nothing less than a bridge between what I found in that book and what I need to say in my own book. The book that I read feeds the book that I write the way a pregnant woman feeds her unborn baby. It happens in the same mysterious way our parents bring us to life from nothing.

          Writing is not something easy, nor complicated, but you can’t make it happen right now when you think you’re writing. You need to connect to the flow that runs through everything that has ever been written and let it grow inside yourself to the point where you feel that whatever you write about is not coming from you, but from somewhere else. That’s when the writing gets born. Or at least that’s when it gets born in my own world.

Excerpt from the novel 'A Gypsy Boy Called Shakespeare'

I’m Shakespeare. Funny, isn’t it? People use to laugh when they hear my name, but gipsy names can be funny sometimes. The day we are born, parents give us names to match their moods, or hopes, or idols. Some love it, some hate it, but as long as I bear the name of a famous writer I think I should consider myself a fortunate one. I had a colleague at school who had been named after a famous karate fighter: Bruzli. He was fortunate as well. Less fortunate was a cousin of mine. They called him Paracetamol. That’s really bad. How sick can you get in the winter and how desperate should you be to recover from a cold to give your child the name of a medicine?

The story goes that mom’s parents made arrangements to marry her with dad when she was just thirteen. But mom said no. She said she wouldn’t marry dad until she reads Romeo and Juliet. She believed that Shakespeare’s story was in fact her story and whatever love was, she needed to know about it from the famous writer. And here she had a valid point, as my grand-grandpa used to say. She was a Julieta herself in her birth certificate, and my father – don’t laugh! – a Romeo.

Reading Shakespeare’s play, mom found out that Juliet was fourteen when she met Romeo so she decided she wouldn’t marry dad until that age. Her parents got mad, but my mom wouldn’t move an inch.

 ‘It was Shakespeare himself who decided that, so leave me alone! If you marry me earlier I might end up with the wrong child and the entire love story would go totally wrong.’

Shakespeare’s love story would go totally wrong anyway, but at that point my mom wouldn’t know about that. She didn’t even finish reading the play. She was just looking to find a reason to hold on to her girlhood for as long as she could. She just needed a bit more time to figure out what marriage was all about.

‘I tell you! I’m not marrying!’ she’d cry out.

Her parents turned to their oldest for help. They waited for grand-grandpa to step forward and say something to cool her off. But the old man surprised them all.

‘I think this girl has a valid point, here,’ he said. ‘Without Romeo and Juliet, there would be no Shakespeare!’

And that’s how a new Shakespeare was born.