Ideas hunt in packs, like wolves

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.

March 23, 2012 | Categories: meta | Tags: art, authors, fairy tales, fishing, forests, Germany, hiking, ideas, literature, nanowrimo, sequel, Sweden, Tolkien, woods, writing | Leave a comment