I have some great news, my friends: I finished the first draft of my novel today! You can probably imagine how happy I am about this after months of work and partly struggling with writer’s block. The draft is almost 85,000 words long and has some in some parts already polish. It turned out vulgar, outright pornographic in parts and the thought of my parents reading it makes me want to crawl into a very dark hole. In some way that’s almost reassuring, but since they know my pen name, I probably can’t prevent them from buying a copy if I ever publish it. Scary!
Where it will go is still written in the stars. First I will have to start editing it. Only after the first, or maybe the second edit I will actually show it to other people. Since I’m in a bit of a grey area with some of the details, I will also have to make sure I don’t piss a certain person off, who happens to feature in the novel. This can either be a very bad thing if this person has a problem with it, since rewriting the lead character kind of defeats the point. However, if this person actually likes it, then this could actually open up some cool possibilities. At this point I can only be very unspecific about this, but I hope that it will all work out for the best.
I will now leave the novel be for a few days, since I will be busy with work stuff, but I expect to start editing in June.
I have also been working a little bit on a different project that is slowly taking shape. However, it’s a somewhat disturbing in some ways, so that I can only work on it over short periods. I tend to have the problem that my characters start invading the real world. The best example is the lead character of my novel. He’s obsessed with records and since I did a lot of research about the topic, I ended up buying some records myself and getting my brother’s old record player out of storage. Since the record player is rather shitty though I’m now planning on buying a good one and have literally spent hours researching the right kind of record player. I imagine, that once I have it, I will end up getting a new system for it as well, which will take more hours of research and so on. All because my lead character happens to be fanatic about records.
Then there is the thing with the Japanese Spider Crab. One day this little monster featured in my other project in some remote thought of the main character. It really was a rather unimportant side remark and I can’t even remember how I even came up with mentioning it. However, days later I still ended up in the Sealife Centre here in Berlin, because they happened to have one of those beasts there. They can have a span of 4m and look really scary. Since this project meanders from one bizarre thing to the next I try to only spend a few days in a row on it, since I don’t want it to invade my life too much. I should probably also never write about really crazy characters, because it would probably mess with my head.
At the same time this very knowledge that fictitious characters can well start to have a real impact on your life as a writer is something that I really cherish about having written this novel. Writing gets you a lot closer to a story than reading it and it somewhat makes me wonder about some of the more disturbing books I’ve read over the years. I wonder what these books have done to their authors.
You know, once upon a time I used to work in IT support. I’m not saying this so you can ask me silly questions about computers. I haven’t worked there in years and by now I know nothing of such things. This little detail might explain my obsession with progress bars though. If you grow up with computers and end up spending a lot of time installing software, like you tend to do in IT support, you come to hate these little bastards. They get stuck at 99% and, although it says 1 minute to go, they don’t move forward at all. Somehow they still give you the impression they’re moving, because they want to torture you and drive you mad. Progress bars are crazy little things. You come to stare at them for hours, especially if you install whole operating systems. Looking at progress bars is just silly though. Just as silly as looking at every new recombination and mutation step in an evolutionary algorithm, something I’ve done too many times as well. It tells you absolutely nothing and instead you should go and have a cup of coffee, somewhere without the screen in sight.
I hate them little progress bar bastards, I really do.
So, why am I putting progress bars on my blog and why am I happy about the progress bars in Scrivener? Simple: I’m in control there! You are free to imagine a maniacal laugh at this point. In Scrivener the progress bar is a direct result of my actions. I write and it changes. It doesn’t just sit there while I wait for magic to happen. No, I’m in control! It’s really quite a power trip!! Same goes for my little progress bars in the side bar of my blog. I can make them say whatever I want!!! Look here:
91372 / 80000 (114.22%)
Of course I’m not that far in my struggle with all these words, but I’m still in control of the progress bar. What a joy!
Now, if you want to add one of those little progress bars to your wordpress.com blog as well, I suggest you run over to this little site, which I’ve come to cherish: honorless.net
There you can create the progress bar and it gives you the HTML code once you click ‘Refresh Code’. The code it gives me for the progress bar I created up there is this one:
You can then insert this code into a text widget in your sidebar or into a post. Up to this step it’s easy and doesn’t need any knowledge of HTML or CSS. Here comes the trick though:
Right now, and this might change back to normal one of these days, wordpress started stripping the div style width from the code. So instead of the correct first line it will save the code without the width: 30%;" part. This will make you lose control over the width of the progress bar in relation to your sidebar or to your space for postings.
To resolve this little problem, just change width to max-width before saving and all is fine again. You can play with the percentage to make the progress bar longer or shorter now. The last step is to also start laughing maniacally about having defeated those nasty little bastard progress bars! MUAHUAHUA!!!!1!!001!2
My father told me for the first time about the story he wanted to write when we were on a holiday in Sweden. If I remember correctly, I was 14 or 15 at that time and I was in love. Our cottage was somewhere in the middle of the woods 20 km from the next village. It was right at a lake and we bought fishing rods with which we would sit down at the jetty with our feet in the water. We were useless at catching the big ones, so those ones we caught were mostly bones. In the end we fed them to the neighbour’s cat.
The landscape was beautiful and the woods were like nothing we have in Germany. Here all natural forests have been cleared to make space for different forests full of fast growing wood. This is the case in almost all of Europe, since it is much more densely populated than most parts of America for example. In Germany only a small patch of natural wood is left somewhere near the Baltic Sea, which I even visited once. It looked nothing like the woods I knew from my childhood. The same was true for this forest in Sweden, since the Scandinavian countries still have vast stretches of land that almost nobody cares to visit. It’s too cold for the most part, too dark in the winter. The region where we had our cottage was one of the more populated areas, but still you could walk in the woods for hours without meeting anyone. The trees were tall and there were moss covered rocks all around. Since this wasn’t mountain woodland, these rocks looked seriously out of place. As if a giant had just dropped them in there.
The air was crisp and clear, very unlike the city air I was used to, and once you stepped into these woods you felt as if you were in the middle of a fairy tale or a Tolkien story. You could find the occasional wild berries, and after the rain mushrooms seemed to just pop out of the ground and onto our plates for dinner. After the rain the forest smelled particularly great, all musky and earthy mixed with the distinct smell of summer that is so terribly hard to pinpoint. Even the cities smell of summer, but much less so than this wonderful stretch of land. We would borrow canoes from the neighbour and visit all the small little islands that lay there in the middle of the lake, uninhabited, but with occasional signs of campfires.
I was torn that summer. On the one hand I was having a great time, I loved the nature around us, the warm evenings, watching the sun go down behind the trees and the cat meowing on our back porch with the lake view. On the other hand I was in love and I sent longing letters home. I would write them down on the jetty or at night when everyone else had gone to bed. The next post box was at a small snack shop that was really quite far away. It was a walk of 45 min one direction. Every second day I would walk there together with my father to send these letters. It gave us 1 ½ hours to talk. And in this time he was telling me everything about his story.
It took him many more years to finally sit down and write it. He wrote the sequel to this story first and even after that he took a long break where he wasn’t writing much. Only in November he sat down to write it during the National Novel Writing Month. He finished his 50000 words, writing every spare minute. On the weekends he met with other people participating in the NaNoWriMo challenge.
A lot of people talk about writing or about the ideas they have for a great novel. What makes people writers though, is when they actually sit down and write. It’s the secret of writing: You actually have to write.
It doesn’t help to stare at blank pages without an idea and hope that it will come to you. It also doesn’t help to write something with no idea behind it at all. You will get stuck very soon if you just think of a good beginning and don’t know where it’s supposed to go next. And even if you have that great idea in your head, that’s also not enough. You actually have to sit down and write it. Annoying, eh?
I think what stopped me most of the time was the lack of a great idea. I could write about myself of course, since I have a reasonably interesting life to tell about, but that’s not really creative. And at times it can even get really difficult if you’re writing about the most difficult times. I have the ideas now and it seems as if I can’t even stop them coming to me. Just today I had a cool idea for a sequel to the novel I’m writing. It would be quite different, but about a topic I always found haunting. I jotted the bare bones down on the back of the white sheet of paper I’m using for short notes. And there I thought this idea would let me go at some point. No, it carries on and on and on.
As I am sitting here writing these lines, I’m looking over to the front door of the house across. A guy with a leather jacket and a hood on his head is pacing while smoking a cigarette and talking on his mobile. The mirror of a scooter is throwing the sky back at me while a young girl wearing a head cover and a blue coat walks past. The twigs and branches of the tree in the backyard are bouncing up and down in the wind. It’s the typical view from my desk. Nick Cave is howling out of the speakers left and right from my desk and it’s totally understandable how I can’t keep the words flowing. His voice drags me off the sentences and I feel inclined to listen to his lyrics. An old gnarly Turkish woman in a brown coat is trying to keep her skirt from falling down while searching for her keys. A woman around 30 with a boy of 5 or 6 step out of the house. She holds the door for the old lady. Now a couple of men walk towards the door, one of them with an orange plastic bag from the vegetable stall on the parking lot of the DIY shop two backyards from here. He has grey hair with black sprinkles and walks with no inclination to rush whatsoever. It’s 3 pm and none of these people seem to have 9 to 5 jobs. That’s my neighbourhood; it’s always in a Sunday afternoon mood. The sun is breaking through the clouds again. I can’t wait for the summer to be here.
Speaking of Nick Cave … the other day I posted about my rather sarcastic message to a seller of second hand books (read it here). They had sent me a really ridiculous book instead of the Nick Cave biography I ordered. To my surprise they actually answered. They told me that they didn’t have the book in stock after all, oh surprise, and offered to refund me. This is actually quite interesting, since I didn’t even ask for a refund. Maybe my sarcastic message had a certain impact.
Since I actually needed the book as research for my own novel, I ordered it new instead. This way I could only order a paperback edition though, since the hardcover seems to be out of print. However, now I feel generally really disgusted by the entire experience, since the new book arrived in a worse condition than I expect from a second hand book. The cover has dents, because of a sloppy binding and the paper is wavy as if it was lying in water for a while. The picture pages can hardly be peeled apart, because the book is such a shitty production altogether. I feel sorry for Ian Johnston, the author of the book, since Clays Ltd, St Ives have done such a despicable job of producing it. I sincerely hope that my own novel won’t suffer the same ill fate.
Speaking of the book. The delivery man caught me off guard yesterday, after a writing bout until 3 am. It’s a long way from the bed to the door. Yesterday evening I got the book from a neighbour, middle-aged with a friendly face, who came down to my door to give me my package. Apparently he also doesn’t have a 9 to 5 job. The neighbours here are friendly and sometimes you see them stop on the stairs to talk to each other. There is no rush.
The other day one of the neighbours’ boys waited for his friend outside the door of their flat, the one across from mine. He saw me coming up the stairs and got inside as quickly as he could. He was so quick that I couldn’t guess his age, but definitely young. The door was still open, but I couldn’t see him. He was hiding. I unlocked my own door and as I was closing it from the inside I saw the boy peeking at me from behind his door just as I was peeking at him from behind mine. One of the older neighbours’ boys, I can only guess as to how many there are, also once brought me a package over. A friendly guy, definitely working age, but younger than me. We had a quick chat and he was somewhat surprised, since he apparently didn’t know that I had moved in. Understandable, since Nick Cave howls far from the stairwell. A third neighbours’ boy leans out the window to smoke right now.
I once lived in a bedsit in a concrete block in Kaarst, a small town near Düsseldorf. The neighbour next door was a junkie just out of rehab. His girlfriend was trashing all of his furniture on the day after he moved in, at 6 in the morning. She was out of her mind on drugs. A few months later, just when I was going out, the father from down the corridor struck the junkie in the face, because that fucked up guy had hit his girl on the corridor during a row. He tried to justify himself. “She’s out of her fucking mind, taking heroin while carrying my child. She deserves it”! The father from down the corridor said “Don’t blame her. You’re the madman hitting a pregnant woman! You pick a woman, you live with your choice. Try hitting her again and I call the police”. Then he went back to his 2 room flat at the end of the corridor. They always had the door open, because there were at least 5 people living there, including a gnarly old grandpa with a cane. Of course it was a Turkish family. Generational family homes are otherwise uncommon in Germany.
My neighbourhood here in Berlin has a bad reputation. It’s supposed to be a place full of youths up to no good. However, I know what a bad neighbourhood is and this isn’t one of them. What I see is kids playing ball on the street, people who talk to their neighbours, families who take care of their elderly and builders coming home from work. I see a laundry delivery guy bringing a suit for someone in the house next door. I see a couple walking their two dogs while holding hands. I see the waitress of the café in front of the retirement home chatting to her girlfriends across the bar. Youths are always up to no good, but at least this is a neighbourhood in the real sense of the word, where neighbours talk, take packages for each other and, better still, where it’s always Sunday afternoon. Or was it Saturday? Ah, never mind, what day is today anyhow?
Homer Simpson: [lounging on the couch in his pajamas, drinking beer] Ah. I love these lazy Saturdays. Marge Simpson: It’s Wednesday, Homer.
In its natural state, life is pretty balanced. Shit gives rise to the complexity of life and life again produces shit. It’s waves and waves of life, shit and death that all interrelate somehow and make sure that shit and corpses don’t take over the world. Without the continuation of life the world would gradually decay until it was just covered in corpses and dung that eventually decompose into some kind of goo. At least that’s how I imagine the end of all life. Some call this movement towards the ultimate final goo the second law of thermodynamics, some call it entropy, and other less fair-minded people, like me, just call it the shit we have to deal with, mainly because ‘shit’ is such a short and poignant word.
What people tend to forget is that shit, corpses and death are utterly necessary for life to even exist. Not plants or insects are at the bottom of the food chain, shit and corpses are. There is all the ugly iffy type of life that birds eat all the time, worms and insects and these wouldn’t exist without heaps and heaps of dung and dead goo. There is a somewhat disgusting, somewhat beautiful relationship between life and death that needs to be spelled out in these terms somehow, so that people are reminded of how life really works and make their choices accordingly.
We go into a supermarket and buy a piece of flesh from an animal that was at some point a living, breathing entity. This being had a mother and possibly big eyes that let humans go “Awww cuuute”, because we’re genetically inclined to care for cuddly little things with big eyes. Well, until one day the cuddly little thing isn’t little or cuddly anymore, and then we have it for dinner. Just, that nowadays people don’t even see anymore that they’re eating a part of a corpse, unless someone makes it real obvious and sells a whole dead piglet. Yes, we eat corpses. Chilled corpses maybe, but still, we have something in common with the worms and insects that are at the bottom of the food chain. We don’t want to be reminded of it, but it is true nonetheless.
We don’t want to see corpses, we don’t want to see death in its reality. We don’t want to be reminded that one day the worms and insects are going to get us all, unless we give ourselves to the fires of hell, no wait, the fires of the crematories. We wax our relatives up, paint their faces so that they somehow don’t look so dead. We don’t leave them lying around until they start to look somewhat disgusting, no we chill them and then we bury them six feet under. It’s more hygienic that way.
The same we do with shit. It goes down the toilet and is flushed somewhere, God knows where, and that’s the last we see of it. Dog shit lies in the street and we feel inclined to fine the dog owners if they don’t make the shit disappear. It’s just not very nice is it? We don’t want to see shit, just like we don’t want to see corpses and dead relatives being eaten by worms.
However, without corpses we don’t get our steak or Sunday roast. Without shit there is no food chain, no life, no world as we know it and sometimes it’s important to spell it out. Even our own deaths are necessary, because without it there is no room for the children of our children.
Now, the problem with avoiding shit, death and corpses all the time is that we tend to forget how to live. We don’t take risks that might get us killed. We eat only healthy food that doesn’t make us happy, we take all the excesses out, the extremes, the jumping of cliffs, hitchhiking with strangers, walking through parks alone at night. Those might even be reasonable precautions, but what’s even worse is that take it one step further. We don’t do stuff that involves paddling through valleys of shit. With this I mean that we try to avoid doing things that confront us with heaps of stuff that we don’t want to do. Maybe it’s bureaucracy, maybe it’s talking in front of a lot of people, maybe marketing or putting yourself on the line. And we all try to avoid this shit as much as possible, because it scares us.
Without shit, there is no beauty though. Musicians have to face the whole industry if they want their albums to be bought. And without their albums being bought, they will stop being musicians, unless they’re terribly idealistic and have too much time on their hands. Full-time musicians have to go on the road to play shows, with the right timing, the right publicity and terribly uncomfortable circumstances. They have to face labels and even the worst of the worst, music journalists, who to musicians often seem like vultures, because they turn the words in your mouth so that it actually gets them a story, even if there is none. Also writers have to face similar things. They face the critics, the publishing industry, book signings, reading tours, book fairs and the likes. No job is without its own valley of shit that you continually have to cross, just to get to the blooming mountains with dew sprinkled flowers.
The point is, those dew sprinkled flowers are worth it. How many people end up doing a job they hate, because they didn’t want to be facing one of these big and obvious valleys of shit? And how many of them still cross their own version of this valley every day? Annoying customers, bosses, efficiency ratings, monthly and yearly appraisals, layoffs, backstabbing co-workers and the rut of producing shit that nobody really needs anyway. And no dew sprinkled flowers whatsoever, because in the end you just look back and think “Whoever needed the crap I wasted my life with for the last 45 years?”
Whatever you do, there is shit all around, and that’s normal. Shit can only be avoided, by not living life altogether. The question really is, whether you want to spend your life waist deep in shit shovelling it from one side to the other, or whether you want to build a boat and enjoy the flowers on the other side. Either way, we just have to accept the shit, the corpses, even the worms, the insects and the vultures, because it’s all part of the circle of life. What we do with that is our own choice though.
And even if this all might sound somewhat dreary and depressing, from time to time someone actually has to write an ode to all this shit, because it’s all around us and somehow it fulfils its function. It enables us to live and do the things we like, even though we find it all pretty disgusting and terrible if we give it too much thought. And here it comes, an ode to the shit we all have to deal with, day in and day out:
It’s an ode
Oh, it’s an ode
to the trains that are late every day,
the dumb students you have to teach,
the idiots to whom you serve food,
to abusive customers all over the planet
and to all the pathetic bosses who don’t know shit,
to the people who walk slowly right in front of you
although it’s obvious that you’re in a hurry.
It’s an ode
to the tax return forms,
or your apathetic unemployment agency case worker,
to the nonsensical phone calls that keep you from working productively
and your old computer at work that keeps crashing,
the rancid coffee in the office that smells somewhat burnt
and the milk that has gone off again
because you’re never home.
It’s an ode
to the cat that always jumps on the table
although you keep telling it to get down,
to the screaming kids on all the airplanes in the world,
to your neighbours who wear high heels in their flat,
to the squeaking door in your office,
or the architects who enjoyed designing a building without windows,
to the oil refinery of which your town stinks
and the flatmates who steal your orange juice.
It’s an ode to this,
and to all the other lovely shit that keeps driving you insane.
And now you better go back to paddling, my little sailors.
For quite a few years I’ve been embarking on little journey’s into the world of film.
I always loved going to the cinema. It has so many nice moments. There are the almost whispering conversations before the ads start, the snarky comments about the bad ice cream commercials, the trailers – half of them entirely laughable -, the smell of the popcorn, the slightly sticky and sick feeling after too much of the stuff, the dazzling light when you come out of a dark movie theatre into the sunshine of a dull afternoon. It’s all pretty fantastic.
When I was a teenager I came to identify the years by certain movies that came out during that time. I bought soundtracks and there was a certain feel to them that changed over the years as the popular music changed. I even had times when I had to wait for new movies to come out, because I had seen all the ones that were being shown at the time. There was also a cheap cinema in town where you could see a movie for what would be now about 1.50€. We went there regardless of the movie on Friday nights before hitting the clubs. I’ve seen some of the worst movies there, but also some really good ones, all accompanied by some beers that we smuggled in there in our backpacks.
Then there was the time when movies became available on DVD. For my family VHS was a bit of a disaster, because my parents bought a VHS recorder produced by Mitsubishi. Motorbikes they can produce maybe, but stay away from their consumer electronics, it was broken most of the time. DVDs were different though, because I could watch them on my computer and there I usually stayed in control myself instead of letting my parents pick. I became pretty obsessed with DVDs and for a while I would buy a cheap DVD a week, watch them over and over, and it somehow made the movie experience more personal. And suddenly I wasn’t depending on the TV program anymore or on what was playing in the cinemas. It gave me back the control over what I wanted to watch.
How much the perception of the world changes with the different media available! It’s really quite interesting to imagine how different everything would have been for me if I were born 50 years earlier with the newsreel still on in the cinemas, during the time before television. Nowadays we have all this information at our fingertips and we can watch all sorts of movies that would have been unavailable to us before the advent of video, or even more crazy, the internet. The movie industry and the TV networks don’t have the control anymore over what we watch. No wonder that people don’t go to the cinema to watch silly films anymore. They can sit at home and have their pick of the really good movies instead. However, it’s also not necessarily always a good change either. Nowadays we don’t make a big event of watching a film anymore, which is a shame, really. We watch them while we cook or eat and often we even stop them half way through and do something else before we continue watching. The whole experience is different now, less of a special occasion.
Especially during some of the more boring and lonely times during my first year at the University of Sussex I would get movies from the Film Studies Library and watch them while I was eating lunch. I just hated eating alone, so that was my attempt of being surrounded by fictional characters at least. During that time I even attended a few Film Studies courses, sat in lecture theatres watching movies for university credit points and in the end I wrote pretty pathetic analyses. People think studying Film would have to be something pretty fun for someone like me, who loves cinema, but in fact it was pretty much torture. I was much more interested in watching movies than in writing about them, especially academically. And then there was also the problem that we didn’t just watch good movies. Some of them were supposed to show us certain topics in Film Theory and suddenly you end up watching pretty daft movies with lots of silly racism and exotism in them, just so that we stupid little students understand what exotism is. I also had a course on British cinema and that was probably one of the worst experiences ever, since a lot of the famous British films are just war propaganda. Of course I then had to hold a presentation about one of these boring war movies and started making fun of how some German infiltrators were portrayed. My goodness, they actually demanded to get coffee, barbarians! All in all Film Studies takes all the fun out of watching movies in my view.
A different perspective on film was one of my creative writing courses at university. It was a course on scriptwriting and so I spent a couple of weekends obsessing about character sheets and structure, but nothing much came of it. Somehow I couldn’t press my own vision to fit the format. I just wasn’t that much into the idea of writing like this anyway. I’m a quite visual person, so film probably wouldn’t be the wrong medium, but I need less rigid constraints for my writing. Externally visible behaviour, that’s the constraint that I find difficult. I find stories much more interesting in which something fundamentally changes without anything obvious happening at all.
So, everything those academic film courses did for me was to convince me that film is not my medium somehow. I don’t want to write about film, neither critically nor academically, and so far I also didn’t manage to get into writing screenplays at all. There is still this fundamental obsession with the moving pictures though, but I think it’s all based on the story telling aspects of it. I watch movies mainly because I’m addicted to stories and certain ways of telling them.
I’m interested in all sorts of different types of movies, although I certainly have some favourites. For a while I was pretty obsessed with Woody Allen movies. I watched almost all of them and I think what makes them so compelling is precisely what some people find annoying about them: The utterly crazy characters. In fiction you can come up with totally exaggerated characters and often you can even get away with that, it just fascinates me. Woody Allen movies show mostly extreme examples of this, because he writes mostly comedy. I’m interested in these movies not because of their comedy aspects, but mostly because of the extreme characters in them. Some people like to write about extraordinary things happening to normal everyday people, but I’m not interested in normal people at all. I like crazy characters, extreme examples of stereotypes or the worst anti-heroes. They make for interesting stories, although they are in some sense not even really believable. And that’s another thing I’m interested in: When does a character become unbelievable? How crazy do things have to get for us to say: Nah, that’s bullshit! And when do we stop or even start to sympathise with anti-heroes? Where is the borderline between normal and fucked up, between believable and unbelievable, when do we conclude that someone is nothing more than a pathetic asshole?
At the moment I’m really into watching old black and white movies, mostly Film Noir from the 40s and 50s. I set myself the goal to watch all the films on a list of 250 Film Noir movies and I’m hoping that it will tell me something more about my questions, since Film Noir is full of extreme characters. It’s my latest little journey into the world of film, but again it’s all about the story telling. And maybe one day I even figure out how to overcome my problems with the constraints of scriptwriting.
Buying second hand books online can really give you some fits of anger sometimes, especially when there is a mixup and you end up receiving something completely unrelated. In my case I battle this emotion with writing sarcastic little emails to the seller. I will probably never hear from this one again:
Dear #fill-in-ridiculous-username#,
After already waiting half a month for the book I ordered – Royal Mail at its best I guess – I finally received *the wrong book*. I ordered Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave and the book I actually got was Steven W. Mosher, A Mother’s Ordeal, something about the Chinese One Couple One Child policy. Since I actually needed the book I ordered about a week ago and the complete unrelatedness of the two books is utterly laughable, I can only see this as a sign to take my business elsewhere.
If the book I actually ordered is returned from a similar odyssey or found somewhere, you can obviously send it to me if you wish. However, until then I’m holding this “lasting piece of literature” I received from you as a hostage. In case the other book doesn’t show up, you can keep the money by the way, since my floor is somewhat crooked and maybe I can use my hostage to stabilise my desk or something.
Reading the book? No thanks. China is seriously overpopulated and it’s a semi-totalitarian state, tough luck. My goodness though, who needs to read a book about that nowadays, almost 20 years after the book was first published? And especially when other people are held prisoner for having the wrong political views or, oh god even worse, when other people are being exploited under terrible conditions in the Apple factories? Seems to me that in the book which you erroneously sent to me all is well in the end. So I can only congratulate everyone involved on coping well with the difficulties of their lives, well done! Apart from that it seems to me more like the proverbial Chinese bag of rice.
I conclude therefore that “hostage” is probably not even a very accurate choice of word, since probably nobody would be terribly bothered about the book staying in my custody. I guess if there actually was a mixup, the person who in the end received my book would say to himself: “Blimey! Never mind that shoddy other cheap thing I ordered; this is actually much more interesting!” Maybe I even got someone interested in Mr. Cave, who knows! So, in the end I am almost certain that all will be well without even lifting a finger, how nice! And on this note …
So long and thanks for nothing,
…
Still, this actually gives me a rather weird strategy of promoting my novel. It would go like this: I could pose as a seller of silly books and then I just send all them silly people my book instead. I guess that at least a part of the buyers will not bother with all the hassle of returning it …
Nick Cave said in an interview that he sacked his muse and started to go to an office instead. I think that’s the way to go. Or maybe not quite. The muse can’t be sacked. Either you have her around or you don’t. You can’t control her anyway. Sometimes you can work with her, but mostly she works with you, and only if you’re lucky. It’s the same as what I wrote about the zone. You can’t always be in it, or you go mad. And you can’t always play with the muse, she’ll break you. There is something to be said about continuous hard work though. Even if you sit there and it’s boring and you stare at the screen or your notepad with hate, there is something worthwhile in the struggle with it all. Maybe an idea comes, maybe you have to cut it out of your fingers, bleed it onto the page, but no matter how you got there, it’s an idea nonetheless. And working with ideas, making something good out of them, that’s what you need the hard work for. You sit and toil over your words. And in the end you just want to delete it all, or crumple it all up, set fire to it, destroy it, but if you don’t, and if you let it sit for a while, maybe you realise that it’s a start. And if you stop hating yourself for a while, or dial the self-loathing down a notch at least, then maybe you will let yourself get somewhere, maybe even somewhere good.
I look at what I’ve written today and smile. It’s angry, it’s juicy, and it’s not perfect, but somehow it’s all starting to make sense, to get a certain shape and it feels as if there are not so many blanks to fill in now. I still have half a month to torture myself with this and I have decided to stay away from the outside world for this time, hide in my flat, type away and not let myself be distracted. What I’m writing has a certain flavour and if I go out there and have a good time, maybe go dancing for a bit, I fear that I’m going to lose that flavour, the feel for what it’s like to be my protagonist. My protagonist sits at home alone, so I sit home alone. That’s part of the torture as well. It’s worth it though. This morning I read over this part of the novel and started to see how homogenous it’s starting to become and how much atmosphere it’s starting to have. I’m looking forward to the editing part, because I hope I can then change my routine a bit, go out and enjoy Berlin without losing the flavour of it. By then the flavour will be already in what I’ve written and I just need to work with it, make it stronger or tone it down in places. It seems easier from the writing perspective. I’m suspecting though that it will turn out to be harder than it seems now.
In any case, I’m enjoying the process. Writing this has been a lot of fun and it was much less torture than any of my previous attempts. Maybe the earlier attempts were all too personal, too difficult for a first novel, who knows. This is more distant, more fiction, less autobiographical although I’m starting to see certain autobiographical aspects as well, but more as if I was writing about a caricature of myself. A fictitious me. It’s all a bit strange and unbecoming, if I think of myself actually in this role, but the character I’m talking about has certainly some aspects in common with me at least. However, since I can’t take myself out of the story anyway – after all I’m the author – I might as well appear in it in some form or other. It’s not so bad really. It’s ok as long as I say to myself and everyone else: This is fiction, it never happened. Else people might think that I’m more crazy than I really am.
One last thing: I’ve cracked the 50000 words milestone today! I started writing on the 19th of February and today is the 14th of March, which means that I’ve finished the goal of the National Novel Writing Month even before the month is over. I don’t know how people with fulltime jobs can pull this off, but I know it’s possible. My dad wrote 50000 words in November and he works fulltime. That’s my dad, I’m sure proud of him! I myself won’t stop here and still have 30000 words to go, which is the entire third part of the story and makes for a better length of a novel. That third part will have a lot more dialogue than the other two parts and there will be lots of stuff happening. So, it will be dense, probably pretty messy and it will be difficult to write. At least that’s what I suspect. However, that’s not so bad overall, since so far it has been pretty easy actually. Day in, day out I think: What’s the catch? The big problems must still be coming somewhere, so I’ll better watch my back over the next couple of weeks.
Today I watched the film The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz, after Blixa Bargeld, the singer of Einstürzende Neubauten, mentioned it positively in an interview. Maybe I should have been warned by that, since Mr. Bargeld moved in “artsy” circles from the very start of his music career. “Artsy” people often find that it’s already good enough when something is different. For me that’s normally just not good enough. Here a little review that I wrote on IMDb. It will probably get rejected, since honesty sometimes automatically leads to “spiteful remarks”, which is against their guidelines. However, I still felt like writing the review, since I already concluded that watching this film was definitely a waste of my lifetime. This way I could at least make it have some value. Well, if “waste of lifetime” counts as spiteful, and some people might say so, then it will be rejected for sure …
Waste of lifetime
With this film I’m actually suspecting an all out con game, an
elaborate joke, since it’s just too nonsensical to even take seriously.
The makers are probably laughing about the fact that people are willing
to give them awards for it.
And even if I see this as comedy, this film still is too incoherent,
too packed full of stuff and it has too many switches in style to even
be watchable. That said, it also doesn’t lack good ideas. I even
laughed a couple of times, but as a whole it’s just overdone, boring
and probably just too low-budget for what it’s trying to do. As soon as
the mythical nonsense starts, all the atmosphere just evaporates.
That’s when I wanted to turn it off. And I should have, since it turned
out to be a waste of my precious lifetime, really.
It’s a shame, since the idea actually had potential, else I wouldn’t
have wanted to watch it in the first place.
Even the comparison with Buñuel in some of the other reviews is
laughable, since Buñuel didn’t aim for just nonsensical. He aimed for
the surreal, which involves much more than ridiculing aspects of
society (although it definitely has a part in it too). It seems that a
lot of “artsy” people haven’t quite noticed the difference between the
two concepts yet.
After writing the review I thought to myself that even if I might be a bit harsh there, maybe I’m still onto an interesting question. It’s obvious that we can’t differentiate between the surreal and the nonsensical with a simple clear-cut scheme, but maybe it’s even more difficult than that. Do we see the worth in a work of creativity only if it makes sense to the beholder? Or is it enough already, if the makers of the film managed to find meaning for themselves in making it? Does the outcome have to be appreciated by the public to really hold up even for the makers? I’m not so sure whether there even can be a general answer to that. Everyone who creates something has to answer this question for themselves, since the “why” is just such an immediate and haunting question. Why even bother? Is my own interest in the end enough or do I give up as soon as I realise that nobody really cares? For me the answer is clear: It only needs one single person, who appreciates the effort and then it was worth it. This person might actually be me as well, if I actually have a good time doing what I’m doing. If it’s noting more than just a drag and nobody else really cares either, then I might as well not do it. However, as long as I’m enjoying the process, it’s definitely worth it. So, if these guys, who produced the film had fun (and it looks like it), then it was at least only a waste of my lifetime.
Last night when I couldn’t sleep I decided to watch a little something on story telling. This is actually a video with Ira Glass, who is apparently a radio guy, so it’s not altogether aimed at writers, but it certainly is relevant too. Especially interesting is what he says about the problems of the beginner. To sum it up he says that at the beginning we all get into the creative process, because we have taste. For the first few years there is then a sort of gap between your good taste and what you actually manage to produce. So, most of the time you will be disappointed by your own work. This only changes over time and you will start to produce better work eventually. So, giving up during that disappointing stage, because “you’re not good enough” is actually a mistake and you have to just struggle through that.
Luckily I have been writing for years. Most of it was shit to be honest, which tells you that Mr. Glass is definitely right about the first part. I also stopped writing fiction at some point, because I thought I wasn’t good enough. Luckily I still wrote a lot of non fiction, which can teach you a lot about writing fiction too. Maybe I will write about that another time. The second part is true too, since I rarely ever complain about the quality of my work anymore since I started writing fiction again. It might still be shit in comparison to great literature, but I actually happen to be able to express the exact feeling I want to express, which is good enough for me. If I go back after months and re-read something I wrote, then I happen to get exactly the feeling that I originally intended and that’s already enough of a progress to think that I’ve come to a point where I should stop criticizing myself and let others do that for me. Whether I will be ashamed of what I write now in 20 years is an entirely different question though. Maybe yes, maybe no, only time can tell.
Is it only me or are you also bored with the standard literature community? What I mean is the writing courses, the contests and the weekly round table discussions of the “coalition of historical fiction writers” (This name is made up. If there is a writing group like this, I apologize for the coincidence). Particularly those people who tend to teach in creative writing courses sometimes strike me as extremely dull characters. Well, after all it’s precisely those people who cannot live off their actual writing, who end up in teaching. Or, if they can earn a living with it, they are so full of themselves that it’s just painful to watch.
I’m not trying to say that all the writing groups are boring, that writing contests never make sense, or that all creative writing teachers are dull people. In fact I know some very interesting writing teachers as well. No, the point I’m really trying make is that the whole institutionalized creative industry surrounding the written word is generally so old-fashioned, dull and altogether boring that I’m really surprised that it can still produce original creative work. When I think of literature I think of Paris or Berlin in the 1920s, the cafés, the excitement, the avant-garde of it all. I think of Beat, the drinking, the drugs, the innovation, the will to piss them all off. The whole writing and publishing industry has all in all nothing in common with the circles that really produced literary innovation. Kafka was not even a writer by profession, he was a bureaucrat. He did not even want his mostly unfinished manuscripts to be published. In fact they were supposed to be burned upon his death and only through an act of betrayal did we come to read most of his fantastic innovative stories.
What does this tell us about the “coalition of historical fiction writers” or similar groups? It tells us that they had no part in producing some of the most influential literature that exists. Yes, they produce words. A lot of words. They produce short stories and books, they sit around tables discussing their writing, discussing their plots and characters and whatnot. Those short stories and books might even be good, but in the end mostly it has nothing to do with great literature. Do you think Jack Kerouac went around and discussed his character development or the progression of his plots with his friends? Fuck no! He got drunk with them!
This is not a discussion about whether anyone can learn to write or whether it all stands and falls with talent, no, I just think that literary innovation, or more specifically great literature cannot be produced by institutions. Sure, one of those writers who happens to have gone through one of these institutions might happen to be someone who can produce great literature, but the literary institutions didn’t make or break his talent. In fact they have little or even nothing to do with it.
You might say now that it needs skill. And I say: yes and no. Think of the punk music of the late 70s and the early 80s. Most of these people couldn’t hold a tune if their life depended on it. Most of them also knew only 3 riffs on their guitar. Did that stop them from producing great music? No! And what about the Harry Potter books? They are surely not the technically best written books in the world, but they tell a great story, which is why they are so successful. Maybe it cannot compete with Kafka, but it shows a gift for coming up with a great story about characters that we care about. And with that it is much more than a lot of professional writers with more technical skill could ever produce.
Sure, when you’re trying to be creative, it helps if you’re not utterly clueless. It can be a problem if you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, but when it comes down to having a great idea there is only one thing that matters: You yourself. If you live a boring life, if you are a dull person altogether, how can you ever produce anything that is worth reading to people who are more interesting than yourself? So, if you’re dull and aim your work at dull people than all that comes out is necessarily dull. Not exactly rocket science. Maybe not all of us even want to be Mann, Kafka, Kerouac or Hemingway, but just blindly combining technical writing skill with “what we think should be interesting” just isn’t good enough even if you write young adult fiction or romance. See, it’s not only “not literature”, it’s boring altogether. This publishing industry, the whole of the institutionalized writing business mainly produces novels which are sold in airports, novels that housewives read at night in bed, novels that people forget. Novels that won’t be reprinted. “Oh, I have read that, wait, what was it about?”, in short: not literature. Mostly it’s not even worth the paper it’s printed on.
The only thing you gain from going through the hoops of writing groups, of contests, of creative writing courses is that you learn how to not ruin your great story. And if you don’t have that great story, then the whole industry teaches you merely how to produce soulless crap. What makes and breaks great literature is your ability to come up with a great idea. If you’re not sure whether your idea is great, then it’s definitely not. And if that’s the case you should probably go out and get a life, rather than to bust your chops to produce more of that crap that is sold at airports.
Again I am sitting down to write. It is not my first attempt at writing a novel, you know. I have tried. And I have failed. Four or five times so far if I remember correctly. And that isn’t even counting the innumerable laughable attempts that I am normally embarrassed to even mention. You know, the ones when I was too young to be taken seriously at all.
Isn’t it always like this? Someone likes to read and suddenly they feel compelled to write, despite an obvious lack of talent and the even more deadly short attention span of “people nowadays”. Well, there you have my problem in a nutshell. Maybe now add a pinch of self-loathing to it, perhaps a bit of perfectionism too and there you have your recipe for failure. Well, not this time. This time will be different, because I will be under public scrutiny. This time I will at least finish the first draft with the method of the national novel writing month, i.e. quantity not quality. This time I’m allowing myself to write badly, since self-criticism was mostly the reason why I never finished any of my other novel projects.
I’m not a writer. I’m a fraud. Like everyone at first.
bearable is barely enough 