Returning to old roots

I'm writing fanfictions again.

During my ABS-CBN days (my journo days), my good friend Purple gave me an advice that I still keep to this day: When you begin to question your capabilities, do something you love doing as a kid.

If there's one thing I love doing as a kid, it was drawing. But I'm too lazy to make images now, or say, re-learn how to draw humans and things and everything else. So I resorted to the second one: writing.

Just writing.

And so, I resorted to writing again. Writing fanfictions, that is. It had been my escape from the grueling journalistic life. In the mornings I wrote straight news articles, but at night, I write narratives and stories. And so, after a few years, I'm updating stories I once left behind to focus on working for GMA. I'm picking up an old bone and re-learning how to write fictions again. The art, the nuances, the dialogues. In English, mind you.

The reason was simple. I'm starting to doubt my capabilities as a soap opera writer. My mentor said I'm too serious and that I tend to think in English then translate it into Tagalog for the script. Was it bad enough? Definitely. It means lacking knowledge in one area and compensating by making do with the area I'm good at. It's not good practice if you want to make a career out of writing soaps. Heck, they're in Tagalog, they cater to the Filipino audience, intellectual or not.

This is enough to make me re-evaluate my career path. And again, I realize I'm probably not good enough for this job. I chose this, yes, but since I started, I never learned the instincts that led me to create almost-perfect scripts. And its been more than one year already. So, after learning from scratch, I am now faced with my biggest roadblock.

I am writing fanfictions again. Yes, I am escaping. I should be reading good Tagalog books. I should be practicing writing in Tagalog. But no, I chose to write again in English, the language I'm comfortable in. I'm writing stories out of it, out of the basic mastery I have of this language.

Because I know, soon enough I would have to leave fanfiction-writing again and embrace the world of soap operas. Eventually, I would have to learn how to unlearn the language I've loved for the last 19 years of my life. (I've been writing in English since I was 7.)

But right now, I want to feel assured that I am good at something, somehow. 10/8/2012