"Fiction is the best kind of reality." — Isabel Bandeira, "Bookishly Ever After."

I find myself agreeing with this quote as I ponder what to entertain my readers with this week. To be honest, I prefer fiction writing over reality writing.

I was born to be a writer, I think. My parents are published authors themselves. Not only did they bless me with bad eyesight, but also the art of storytelling. For as long as I can remember, I’ve found I enjoy the worlds I created far more than I enjoy the world that has been bestowed upon me. My father remembers the time when I was 3 years old, and I saw a hat on the side of the road and began to tell a story about this hat.

Personally, I can remember being somewhere in the vicinity of 6 years old. I was accompanying my mother on a trip to the grocery store. I was fascinated by an advertisement on the floor. In my head, I began to tell myself a story about a group of runaway children. I no longer remember how I came to name most of my characters.

I used to read. A lot. I have gotten in trouble at school for reading (after my assignments were finished of course, but public school tends to dump on the smart children). It would be a lie to say my own stories were not influenced by the books I read or the movies I saw. Because they were and still are. It was certainly where I got a few names. I know for a fact that an evil little boy named Tom was based, in part, off of Tom Sawyer in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

I also pulled names from the people around me, and sometimes that came back to haunt me. Having an active imagination can do that to you. I often got in trouble because I was daydreaming when I was called on for an assignment. I sometimes got caught quickly scribbling down story ideas instead of the notes on the board.

I finally sat down to start writing when I was 9 years old. I had just learned the basics of Microsoft Word, and my mother had it installed on her computer. In truth, my first story was absolute drivel.

The thing about something you're dedicated to is that you have to practice. You have to keep at it, and keep at it. Did I say you have to keep at it? I do not believe there is perfection in writing, but you cannot stop trying to get better. This is why it is so hard to read what you wrote in the past, because you have gotten better. It doesn’t mean that this old work is bad. It might not be — but it means your new work is better.

But you have to find a balance. You can’t let writing take over your life, as much as you sometimes find yourself obsessed with getting the words in your head onto a document. It hurts, but sometimes you have to return to reality. This did not stop the greats, like J.K. Rowling. The beginnings of "Harry Potter" were written on scraps of paper at her local café.

I struggle to find that balance. More often than not, the story I write out in my head never makes it to paper. I have trouble writing, I have found. It is nearly impossible for me to write essays for school. Coming up with 500 words on my cultural anthropology reading is just not my thing. But though I enjoy writing my fictional works, I still have my issues. I think most writers can agree.

I get my writing motivation from any number of places — music, a movie, a news story — and I sit down to write. I have a clear amount of time. I have a working computer and few distractions. I open Google Docs (my preferred place of writing) and suddenly, just like that, the situation is fraught. The cursor blinks on a blank page, and my head is just as empty.

I can hear the words screaming behind a fog, but my fingers are unable to translate. I try to write something — anything — but I already know the truth. I leave the untitled document open and begin to surf social media as the idea returns to its quiet place, silently kicking me.

Those that have read my works agree that I am best at dialogue, and I cannot help but agree. I sit by myself, when it's quiet and I am alone, and I plan out the conversations between my characters. I know how they speak to each other. I make it sound as natural as I can.

Description is a little bit harder for me. I can see the setting in my head. It is sort of a distorted vision of the world, stolen sets from my years spent imagining the worlds in my favorite books, but I cannot seem to find the right way to describe what the characters are seeing. Worse, I forget that the reader cannot see what’s in my head.

I think my most frustrating problem is compiling it all into a coherent story. I have beginnings. I have middles. I have loose endings. I cannot seem to make them all come together. I will get a beginning down, a good four-page story for the Writing Club.

I have mid-story drama written down somewhere, or making room in my brain where psychology had its space. I call my endings loose, because like "The Neverending Story," I have a longterm plan for this universe. This makes writing endings very difficult for me, because I am not sure where is an appropriate place to end the story at hand. I feel like everything — what I’ve written before, what I’m writing now and what I will write in the future — is tied together.

This is why my endings are open, starting the next day for the character while leaving the reader knowing that things are probably not going to get better.