There it was again, this sensation. I don’t know what it is about the nature here that stirrs this in me. But it was the same as everytime I have seen Swedish landscapes: I felt home.
Getting up at 7:30 am, starting the day with meditation, learning about storytelling etc. for an hour, then breakfast, then another meditation, doing some research for an hour or two, taking a short break, having lunch, meditation and then writing to have the evening off for sports and other leisure activities. That was the plan. But of course, this is not reality.
Reality is, having the impression of not being able to hurry out of the house quickly enough to jump into a full day of walking around in the city and museums and inhaling all the information I can find, taking plenty of photos as inspiration for the story until I am kicked out of the museums at closing time, to come home completely exhausted, phoning with Yoji until evening to discuss everything and then writing to notice at 11 pm that the day is way too short for everything that I would have loved to do, leaving me so busted the next day, that it takes me hours to get started into the day and then again working until late in the evening to realise that I have not done any sports for the whole week. I guess I still need to find my rhythm, but being so passionate about my work is a good feeling! Yehaaa!
Apart from research, I am reading advisers for authors, about the first steps as a writer, about storytelling and other tools of writing. I am reading classical and modern best-sellers and analyse the masterpieces on what I like about them and what I don’t like. While this can help improve and enrich my story, there is also a certain risk to it. As Dorothea Brande wrote in her book “Schriftsteller werden”, I found myself at the point of a fresh author that despairs about all his own shortcomings. I saw how my plot is not as evolved as from this story, and how my characters do not develop as quickly as in this book, how my English vocabulary was missing all the nuanced adjectives and adverbs as in this and that novel…
What brought me over this phase, though, is the strict self-discipline of writing at least one scene a day, no matter how much time I have spent with research or other things before. Like this I know, I’ll have my first draft of my part of the manuscript in approximately 2 months. I’ll enrich the scenes with descriptions from my research and conversations with my co-author over time and then we will see. What I can say is, that writing is calming me down no matter my state of mind before, that this procedure is giving me the strong belief that I can do this, and that so far, despite all the doubts I am content with my writing style.
Tell me! What is it that you appreciate about a good book or a good story in a movie?
#timeandmemories #writing #author #books
Leave a Reply