Yesterday I was talking about things that inspire me, places I encounter and people I sometimes meet. Today I will tell you one of the things that inspires me the most when I am writing short stories.
I am fascinated by the human sorrow and people’s life stories. Each and every person I know has a particular story and something they have suffered greatly for, either if it was a dead pet or family member, if they were abused or just ignored as children and the list can go on forever. No matter how big or small their sorrow is it will always be a part of who they are and who they came to be. But, to get back to the title of this article, most of the time I am a morbid writer. My characters never have a clear facial description nor a name. I think I don’t name them because when naming a thing it loses a part of its meaning and it becomes somehow superficial. Names identify a person or an object and you instantly think about what that object does or how many other people you’ve met having the same name and what were they like; because they are nameless, you can never do that with my characters. Also a name can later mean attachment and I can’t allow myself or anyone else who reads my stories to get attached to any of them because they are suppose to make you feel and not visualize. The people in my stories are entirely made out of feelings and although they have never leaned to express them, I am constructing them to pass their emotions to the readers while self-destructing the character itself. I never allow myself to have a favorite and although it may seem like I do sometimes, I treat them the same and hardly ever one of them stays alive to see the ending of their own story. I am the kind of writer who will almost never make you laugh, but I hope will make you think and connect with your inner self, identify your own grief and pain or acknowledge the sorrow some people can endure, like a rapist or the owner of a whorehouse, a mother who abandoned her child or a defenseless child who was abused by his step father. That’s why people’s stories are important to me because each story is special and must be treated exactly as it deserves. There are no boring individuals, there are only those who haven’t discovered themselves and have a long way to go before they do. Someone asked me what do I do with all the secrets people tell me. I must say that some I keep for myself in a little jar of secrets and admire while remembering the person who told them to me and some I chose to put on paper striping them of their names and all other identifying characteristics and extracting only their naked, sometimes brutal feelings to impact others.
So this is the kind of writer I think I am when writing short stories: a little morbid and dark, crossing a lot of limits, sometimes too straightforward and other times too evasive. My intentions are never to make my reader suffer but to accept other people’s suffering and learn from that. But you know, when it comes to writers sometime intentions change by the minute and to be completely honest, mine are different with each story I write.
