Creative writing and storytelling
I love writing. I discovered really late the passion that I have for crafting phrases in a specific way, in order to start telling a story. It is beautiful. The way the audience responds to the same message can vary wildly depending on how they receive the message itself. Is the message too complex? Is it too simple? Or does it leave space for interpretation and imagination? I love the latter, I tend to go for the former, but I prefer going for simple.
That’s what I discovered on my journey as a creative and fiction writer. My native language is Spanish, so naturally I write better using it. I believe I don’t do a bad job writing on english, but still… I can’t compare.
I’m a fiction author. I published my own (and first) book on Inkspired: a platform for creative writers like me, who are seeking new and simpler ways to write fiction stories, publish them faster, and get discovered by new audiences.
The whole publishing experience has changed for me since the day I started writing my book back in 2004, soon after finishing high school. I remember having 2 classes a semester dedicated entirely to literature: it was literature on Spanish, and literature on English… yeah, both! But literature in English was far more engaging and fun. It had the same content as the one in Spanish (although different books, poets, and authors to study), but I found it more appealing to me, and I didn’t know why. After graduating I realized it had to do with the way my professor, back then, was running the course: she was a pure storyteller, and she always left some space for us, the students, to interpret what we perceive and understand about literature and creative writing than the professor we had on the Spanish “Clase de Literatura”. So… I decided I should be focusing on that when writing my first book, after all, how do I write about magic, wizards, wars, journeys, fantastic worlds, fictional worlds, and everything without falling too short of what was popular back then: Lord of The Rings?. Well, I still can’t compare myself with Tolkien, and I believe I will never can, but those efforts led me to a totally different approach when writing, and soon I discovered that the traditional methods of publishing were not enough.
Authors tend to write in solitary, almost in secret. They don’t let anyone read their stuff… Only the professionals let their editors do so, but emerging writers and independent writers are a little bit more “scared” of freeing their story to the world. They (like me) usually spend years and years writing a book, and after enduring so many obstacles they realize nobody has ever read it, and they struggle to publish it through a traditional publisher. It is just the way it is — Publishers see publishing as a business because it is their business! So, as a business, why should they invest in someone new? Why they should invest in the unknown? It is too risky… But we, the poor writers, took a much higher risk: we invested gazillion hours on a book that will never see the world.
Inkspired let me change that approach. Right there, I can publish a book in parts… (or chapters), so I don’t need to spend many years writing something in obscurity; I can just start up my own book, lean, with 1 chapter as a hook, and see where it goes based on feedback. Also, I can publish right away to an audience: if the content is good enough and I do a bit of self-promotion with my friends on social networks, I will surely start to get some followers; and also the platform will make sure I get some exposure to readers of other stories.
I write about this, not as a fan, but because I believe is the trend now and the future of creative writing and the whole publishing model: publishing stories serially, is a nice way to engage audiences, and even better if you are an emerging writer like me.
So here is my Inkspired Profile in case you want to check it out.
