¨A WRITER WRITES¨ Regina Brett

I want to add to the above quote that a writer must feel the NEED to write. I did. For a long time. But I postponed. And while I did that, I became an Accountant. Then I procrastinated a bit more and I got my MBA. Then, 20 years later, finally I decided to quit that other life, that ´business' focused life and start a new one. At last I said to myself, ´let´s write!´

I did. I left New York after living there for 30 years and went back, with my new wife in my arms, to Bogotá, Colombia. I had to do it like this. I had to break away from that previous life, create a new one, start again. Why Colombia? That´s where I was born. Also because I wanted to recover my mother tongue; Spanish. It was one of my desires to basically learn how to write in Spanish again. My Spanglish wouldn´t get me anywhere in the Bogota writing community. I knew this. So I learned, I read, I applied and got accepted into a free creative writing program from the city. A 6 month writing course, in Spanish of course. Oh man, I knew I was doing the right thing, I could feel it. I loved diving into this new world just for the pure love of writing. Added benefit? Meeting others like me. My classmates and my teacher ( Pedro Badran - a published Colombian author) were incredible. I learned so much from them. By the end of the course, my Spanish was kicking butt. 😜

Then, it was time to continue with my search. I felt more confident. When people asked me, ´What do you do, Diego?´ I would answer, ´I´m a writer.¨ Oh man, that felt good. To be able to convey that to the world, to whomever asked, to whoever wanted to listen. I WAS A WRITER! 💪🏽💪🏽💪🏽

From the beginning, I had one big dream, a simple one; to see one of my stories shown on the screen. Tv, movie theater, it didn´t matter. Just one. It did happen. And it happened at the best time of my life. It took 10 long years, but it happened, and it was called BASIC. (https://fb.watch/nJPqO9Yfn9/) A children´s animated TV series.

There is another quote that I like to share with you. It is from JC Walley (https://www.scriptrevolution.com/.) He said, ¨There are films I want to make that feel so far out of my reach right now, but everything I’ve achieved thus far felt out of my reach at one point.¨

I strongly agree with his words. That´s how it was with me. I will indulge in another post a lot more regarding Basic and how it happened, how it evolved. But the reality is, if I hadn´t taken my time to write, those 10 long years, if I hadn´t decided to change my life and moved to Bogotá, to have a family - by then I already had my 2 beautiful kids - Basic would not have happened. But with a lot of focus and stamina and desire and hard work and thousands upon thousands of written pages, well, you as a writer can also find that special moment when something you write is shown and seen and criticized by thousands of people. But in my case, the greatest reward was to be able to wake up one Saturday morning and watch the first episode with my kids. That was surreal. And that will be a story for the next blog.

W + L = M is about life experiences evolving into a TV series, a movie, a book. In my first two blogs I wanted to tell the background story on how everything evolved, and it is still going on. I will connect and give you, blog after blog, a first hand experience on how each of my stories took form. I´m still learning, still dreaming, still writing. I do believe we can all do this.

Thanks for reading my thoughts. I´m Diego.https://www.writinglifemovies.blog/blank-1