a novel in the making

Posts tagged “Germany”

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: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sunday afternoon mood

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.

March 20, 2012 | Categories: meta | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment