THE ACT OF WRITING...

Good morning. Today is Saturday, and for this reason I am not publishing our daily soap opera. For various reasons, I decided to publish it only from Monday to Friday, leaving Saturday and Sunday to write some chronicles and other types of writing... Today we're going to chronicle. And what is the subject I have chosen for this date? Well, after much thought, I decided to write about... the act of writing. But why precisely about that? Well, I participate in several Facebook groups where the main focus is, without a doubt, the craft of writing. I always liked to put my ideas on paper, although I didn't do it with the constancy I would like. And these days I ended up getting into various polemics where, not infrequently, I ended up contradicting myself... I'll explain... it all started in a group called "Clube do Livro", where they published a comic strip criticizing those who start writing and, logically , still does not have mastery of the art of telling a story in prose, although they have excellent ideas... according to these people, if the aspiring writer does not know all the rules of the language in which he writes, he should not venture to show his production for others... in short, they claim that the person cannot even read a comic book, and wants to get involved in writing a book... how daring...

The second controversy, still regarding the art of writing, was with a co-worker. A very intelligent and cultured person, he was talking about the art of deconstructing a text in order to understand its structure. Well, of course I disagreed. After all, the analyst of a text cannot guess what the author's idea was when he wrote his original. You may or may not like what I wrote... but you'll never be able to know what I was thinking about when I put this or that action on paper, since the act of writing is something spontaneous, and you (at least it's like that with me) it will only define what is happening in your writing when you are finalizing it.

The third was about a writing challenge. And what was that challenge? Writing a mini story with three hundred characters... which was later increased to six hundred. With all the respect I have for the creators (who, I cannot deny, are extremely talented), a text of three or even six hundred characters cannot be called a "short story"... forces you to develop an idea with a reduced number of words. It forces you to plan the entire structure of the text, even before starting. However, at least for me, this is not how a text is produced, be it a short story or any other type of writing. When I'm in front of my desktop and propose to write, I like to let go, let my imagination take over what I'll be producing. Grammar rules? After I finish writing, I worry about it. You can't write and wonder if the verb is in the right tense, if the crasis was placed correctly and... well, that kind of thing is for the end, when you review your text.

A sentence with three hundred characters has, depending on the size of the words, between sixty and seventy words at most. It is, at best, a quote. Tale? In my opinion, you can't classify it like that. But then I'm acting exactly like the creators of the strip I mentioned above. And that's exactly what bothers me. Well, if I'm right, so are they. But, if they are wrong in their placement, so am I... "or put on the glove and don't use the ring, or use the ring and don't put on the glove..."