Hello all! I'd like to introduce you to Ana Lavinia. Ana is an aspiring author and blogger whom I first had the pleasure of meeting at My Blog Guest.
After briefly corresponding with her and reading her blog, I found Ana to be a passionate writer, full of life, and wonderful stories. So I was excited, to say the least, when she agreed to write a piece for my blog.
The following entitled "The Story of My Writing", is just that, a close personal look at her life growing up in Romania and how her love of writing effected her journey.
After briefly corresponding with her and reading her blog, I found Ana to be a passionate writer, full of life, and wonderful stories. So I was excited, to say the least, when she agreed to write a piece for my blog.
The following entitled "The Story of My Writing", is just that, a close personal look at her life growing up in Romania and how her love of writing effected her journey.
The Story of My Writing
I started reading when I was around five, and knowing how to read was my absolute freedom back then. I could finally enjoy my short story books when I wanted to, not just when my mother had time for it. A few years later reading was taking me on daily basis to magic lands where I was having marvelous adventures. I was always identifying myself with at least one of the characters, reading in a breath, without eating or sleeping until the last chapter was over.
The only problem I encountered was that, until later on, I was not able to draw the thinnest line between fiction and reality and had the urge to do everything I was reading about. Of course, my parents never allowed me to go live on a deserted island like Robinson Crusoe or gather a bunch of kids and go explore a cave, like the heroes of a Romanian novel I used to read every summer until I went to high school. So I began writing about the adventures I would have liked to have. I was inventing characters, settings, and situations. I was describing countries I vaguely heard about, using nothing but my imagination and the little knowledge I got in the Geography class; Google was probably not even a glimmer of an idea in someone’s head back in those far away times.
Apart from that, because I had this nerdy ability to write about the same topic in many different ways, I started a small business in junior high. I was writing the essays for the literature class to my less literary endowed classmates, in exchange for candies and chocolate bars. It was the only time I actually gained something out of writing and I truly deserved it. Writing ten different essays about autumn is not an easy job, especially if you are 12 and have a limited vocabulary. But somehow I pulled it off. The teacher never suspected a thing, she was just happy of the pupils’ progress.
Later on, in my teenage years, I ceased dreaming of having great adventures, I closed my business and I turned to boys. Teenage crushes rarely go smoothly and almost never end well, but I found a way to make mine work. Every crush I had was a new short story in my notebook. To be clear, I wasn’t keeping a journal, I was actually telling the story of the crush the way I wanted it to unfold, from beginning to end. Even if in real life the guy didn’t know my name, in my notebook we were married with children eventually, but only after facing many obstacles to achieve happiness; my life wasn’t easy, not even in my imagination.
I was a very troubled teenager. I recall mixed feelings from that dark time, mostly anger and sadness. I also remember how I turned all I felt into poems. I had two notebooks full of morbid lyrics by the end of high school.
At one point, mad that Romanians are racist and judgmental, I wrote a novel about a white girl that had adopted the love child of a friend of hers and of a black student and raised him as a single mother. Back then, in Romania, being a single mother or adopting a child was a dare and trying to raise a black one was simply nuts. Of course, I kept my novel very well hidden. If my mother had found it, she would have thought I am one of the white girls in the story and I would have been grounded for life for attempting to ruin her reputation even by thinking of such things. Nobody ever read that novel. It was my silent manifesto against principles I couldn’t understand and against society rules I refused to obey.
As a matter of fact, nobody ever laid eyes on any of the short stories, wannabe novels or poems I kept writing from maybe nine until my early twenties. Every single moment of writing was one moment of freedom for me, a moment when I was taking over, when I could be what I wanted to be and not what I was expected to be. Every moment of writing was a dream fulfilled. Dreams like traveling around the world became true for me, even before I had a passport, all my love stories with my dream boys had happy endings, and you have no idea how many times I lived happily ever after in my mind. When looking back, I realize that by writing, I was filling in the holes I had. Writing was my imaginary way out when there was no real way out, and allowed me to live the life I wasn’t allowed to live. In fact, I was imagining what I wanted to happen to me.
In 2003, when I took my first full time job, I simply stopped writing without any particular reason. For many years, I thought that my muses had left me, due to the not very poetic lifestyle I was having: going to university, studying for exams and working in a computer store were not very inspiring activities. But in fact, the more I think about it, the more I believe I actually stopped writing because having a full time job made me financially independent. I was in my twenties and free to do whatever I wanted, as my parents couldn't decide for me anymore. The world was finally mine. I could travel, I could party, I could drink one too many drinks, and I could spend the nights over at my boyfriend's. I didn’t need to create a fantasy world anymore, as reality was exciting enough.
Many years have gone by since then and now I live like there was no tomorrow. I didn't taste life, I ate it with a big spoon. I did everything I once dreamed of, and began having more dreams, bigger dreams, and crazier dreams. One dream leads to another and I now know I will never take a moment to simply enjoy what I have, I will always keep running, craving for more. It is a blessing and a curse, at the same time.
In August 2010, I started writing again, out of the blue, just the way I stopped. One evening, I was having a funny talk with my sister. As usual, she was accusing me of having a stone cold heart because I don’t cry when watching romantic movies or when a boy dumps me. I seem to keep it together no matter the situation, because it is not easy for someone or something to impress me. So, when she left my apartment, I decided to have some fun with her. I wrote a very mushy piece, adorned with complicated metaphors and I sent it to her email, leaving blank the name of the author. She called me back, highly emotional:
”That was so beautiful. I almost cried. Who wrote that?”
”I did”, I said.
”No, you couldn’t have. You need to have a heart in order to be able to write something like that.”
On this note, I continued playing and I wrote some more. I was posting my writings on Face book, to see the impact they have my friends. After overcoming the people’s surprise and laughing at everybody’s question:
”Are you sure you wrote that?”
Encouraged by the positive feedback, I decided to keep writing. I tried different styles looking for my voice. Among all the fantasy stories, I found myself slipping again into ”escaping from reality” type of writing, by making some very sarcastic, mean descriptions of people that at one point, weren’t exactly nice to me. Every time I did it, I felt guilty for a while, but then I excused myself. After all, it is a decent revenge, way more elegant than actually fighting. I try to avoid conflicts but at the end of the day, I still need to get it off my chest. Apparently, this way works for me. It is artistic and very discreet as I don’t name any names.
It is now the middle of 2012 and coming up on two years since I started writing again. I have two blogs, one in Romanian and one in English and a column on www.examiner.com. I have written about many things and the articles I like best are the ones in which I saved some moments of my life, happy or sad but with great impact on me; Articles containing bits of relationships, bits of traveling, and bits of random days of my existence. Stories that probably in time would have faded out, as memory can be such a cheating spouse. My blog posts are mostly highlights of the last two years of my life. It seems I don’t need to create my custom made reality anymore, like I needed when I was younger. Now, my reality is so overwhelming that I need to preserve it.
I sometimes feel my mind is floating on an ocean of stories. I am full of my own stories and of other people’s stories and I would like to be able to tell them all. But I can’t find words for all of them just yet. Maybe each story has to be told when its time comes and I just have to wait for it. One thing I know for sure, I don’t want to die with all these stories in me.
The only problem I encountered was that, until later on, I was not able to draw the thinnest line between fiction and reality and had the urge to do everything I was reading about. Of course, my parents never allowed me to go live on a deserted island like Robinson Crusoe or gather a bunch of kids and go explore a cave, like the heroes of a Romanian novel I used to read every summer until I went to high school. So I began writing about the adventures I would have liked to have. I was inventing characters, settings, and situations. I was describing countries I vaguely heard about, using nothing but my imagination and the little knowledge I got in the Geography class; Google was probably not even a glimmer of an idea in someone’s head back in those far away times.
Apart from that, because I had this nerdy ability to write about the same topic in many different ways, I started a small business in junior high. I was writing the essays for the literature class to my less literary endowed classmates, in exchange for candies and chocolate bars. It was the only time I actually gained something out of writing and I truly deserved it. Writing ten different essays about autumn is not an easy job, especially if you are 12 and have a limited vocabulary. But somehow I pulled it off. The teacher never suspected a thing, she was just happy of the pupils’ progress.
Later on, in my teenage years, I ceased dreaming of having great adventures, I closed my business and I turned to boys. Teenage crushes rarely go smoothly and almost never end well, but I found a way to make mine work. Every crush I had was a new short story in my notebook. To be clear, I wasn’t keeping a journal, I was actually telling the story of the crush the way I wanted it to unfold, from beginning to end. Even if in real life the guy didn’t know my name, in my notebook we were married with children eventually, but only after facing many obstacles to achieve happiness; my life wasn’t easy, not even in my imagination.
I was a very troubled teenager. I recall mixed feelings from that dark time, mostly anger and sadness. I also remember how I turned all I felt into poems. I had two notebooks full of morbid lyrics by the end of high school.
At one point, mad that Romanians are racist and judgmental, I wrote a novel about a white girl that had adopted the love child of a friend of hers and of a black student and raised him as a single mother. Back then, in Romania, being a single mother or adopting a child was a dare and trying to raise a black one was simply nuts. Of course, I kept my novel very well hidden. If my mother had found it, she would have thought I am one of the white girls in the story and I would have been grounded for life for attempting to ruin her reputation even by thinking of such things. Nobody ever read that novel. It was my silent manifesto against principles I couldn’t understand and against society rules I refused to obey.
As a matter of fact, nobody ever laid eyes on any of the short stories, wannabe novels or poems I kept writing from maybe nine until my early twenties. Every single moment of writing was one moment of freedom for me, a moment when I was taking over, when I could be what I wanted to be and not what I was expected to be. Every moment of writing was a dream fulfilled. Dreams like traveling around the world became true for me, even before I had a passport, all my love stories with my dream boys had happy endings, and you have no idea how many times I lived happily ever after in my mind. When looking back, I realize that by writing, I was filling in the holes I had. Writing was my imaginary way out when there was no real way out, and allowed me to live the life I wasn’t allowed to live. In fact, I was imagining what I wanted to happen to me.
In 2003, when I took my first full time job, I simply stopped writing without any particular reason. For many years, I thought that my muses had left me, due to the not very poetic lifestyle I was having: going to university, studying for exams and working in a computer store were not very inspiring activities. But in fact, the more I think about it, the more I believe I actually stopped writing because having a full time job made me financially independent. I was in my twenties and free to do whatever I wanted, as my parents couldn't decide for me anymore. The world was finally mine. I could travel, I could party, I could drink one too many drinks, and I could spend the nights over at my boyfriend's. I didn’t need to create a fantasy world anymore, as reality was exciting enough.
Many years have gone by since then and now I live like there was no tomorrow. I didn't taste life, I ate it with a big spoon. I did everything I once dreamed of, and began having more dreams, bigger dreams, and crazier dreams. One dream leads to another and I now know I will never take a moment to simply enjoy what I have, I will always keep running, craving for more. It is a blessing and a curse, at the same time.
In August 2010, I started writing again, out of the blue, just the way I stopped. One evening, I was having a funny talk with my sister. As usual, she was accusing me of having a stone cold heart because I don’t cry when watching romantic movies or when a boy dumps me. I seem to keep it together no matter the situation, because it is not easy for someone or something to impress me. So, when she left my apartment, I decided to have some fun with her. I wrote a very mushy piece, adorned with complicated metaphors and I sent it to her email, leaving blank the name of the author. She called me back, highly emotional:
”That was so beautiful. I almost cried. Who wrote that?”
”I did”, I said.
”No, you couldn’t have. You need to have a heart in order to be able to write something like that.”
On this note, I continued playing and I wrote some more. I was posting my writings on Face book, to see the impact they have my friends. After overcoming the people’s surprise and laughing at everybody’s question:
”Are you sure you wrote that?”
Encouraged by the positive feedback, I decided to keep writing. I tried different styles looking for my voice. Among all the fantasy stories, I found myself slipping again into ”escaping from reality” type of writing, by making some very sarcastic, mean descriptions of people that at one point, weren’t exactly nice to me. Every time I did it, I felt guilty for a while, but then I excused myself. After all, it is a decent revenge, way more elegant than actually fighting. I try to avoid conflicts but at the end of the day, I still need to get it off my chest. Apparently, this way works for me. It is artistic and very discreet as I don’t name any names.
It is now the middle of 2012 and coming up on two years since I started writing again. I have two blogs, one in Romanian and one in English and a column on www.examiner.com. I have written about many things and the articles I like best are the ones in which I saved some moments of my life, happy or sad but with great impact on me; Articles containing bits of relationships, bits of traveling, and bits of random days of my existence. Stories that probably in time would have faded out, as memory can be such a cheating spouse. My blog posts are mostly highlights of the last two years of my life. It seems I don’t need to create my custom made reality anymore, like I needed when I was younger. Now, my reality is so overwhelming that I need to preserve it.
I sometimes feel my mind is floating on an ocean of stories. I am full of my own stories and of other people’s stories and I would like to be able to tell them all. But I can’t find words for all of them just yet. Maybe each story has to be told when its time comes and I just have to wait for it. One thing I know for sure, I don’t want to die with all these stories in me.
For more information about Ana Lavinia and her hopes, dreams, and stories; you can find her blog at http://ana-lavinia.posterous.com/
Also you can find her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/laviniawritingcorner
Or on Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/Lavinia_Vanilia
Also you can find her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/laviniawritingcorner
Or on Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/Lavinia_Vanilia