I am an author, but I hate writing

Confession of an author

It may seem strange that I say so, especially considering that in the last seven years I published thirteen books. And yet it’s true: the act of writing for me is real suffering.

First of all, I need to make a clarification. This aversion of mine only concerns fiction. The last book I wrote, still unpublished, is non-fiction and I must admit that I enjoyed writing it. It certainly helped that it was just a matter of expanding the program of a course I teach at university, turning it into a book. Having a complete outline and a precise knowledge of what I should have written made it relatively easy and relaxing to write. I just had to write down what I already knew.

With fiction, on the other hand, that’s a different story. There is creativity involved, which can be truly capricious. Added to this is the anxiety that my creativity is not enough or that, although I have good ideas, I cannot turn them into written words as I would like to. Finally, there is the fact that my mind fights any imposition my sense of self-discipline is forced to use to overcome the other two factors.

This mixture of indecision, unfounded self-doubt and rebellion makes me try to relegate writing to a well-defined period of time separated from those in which, fortunately, I don’t write. Thus…