Studying two majors while having a full time job and learning a language. This is how my life feels at the moment.
When I took the TOEIC several years back, I was not aware that I would attempt to write a novel in this language one day. I reached 975/990 points and I advanced my English proficiency since then. In day to day life, the amount of words I knew were completely sufficient. However, writing novels in English taught me that there is still a long way to go. I hence recently started using the App “vocabulary builder” to hopefully make my future readers enjoy exploring beautiful language. English is all good and well, but you might wonder how my Swedish is improving while living in Stockholm. I must say, the Swedish don’t make it easy to practise their language. They speak far too well English all-together. However, I had a chance to warm up my Japanese again. Would be a pity if the years of hard work studying would go to waste. Only future knows, whether it will degrade to JLPT N3 or advance to JLPT N1 level one day. Let’s not speak about my French which is somewhere in a deep slumber.
Apart from general language training, I still study a lot about creative writing, for example how to describe interesting characters, how to keep freedom of interpretation within the plots, what to describe and what to tell in a story. I start to understand how people can study this at university for several years. My co-author Yoji and me did some writing exercises together to adjust our writing styles. We played with pacing while we had our hero go from relaxed to stressed or from hiding over running to fighting. We explored people introduction and interaction while the protagonist met a bunch of people of whom they did not like everybody. And we had fun torturing our characters through emotional outbreaks in rational meetings and then calm them down through meditation. It was quite the joy to discuss how to depict these situations adequately and in an interesting way. Be curious about finding the learnings of these exercises in our novel. 😉
But then there’s also studying the history, past technology and society of this country. Tracing back life in 19th century Sweden is at its final stage, way quicker than I had expected, or so I want to believe. I was so positively surprised about how the Swedish support this kind of exploration. Besides the ones about history that you’d expect, there are plenty of museums about architecture, traditions, jewellery, fashion, even tableware of the old times, some of which have even free entry like the Stockholm city museum and the historic museum. I’ve also been location scouting and imagined how life could have been back then. Photos from the open air museum Skansen and from the internet helped to get a better image of furniture, tapestry etc.. From there, detailed concepts were developed, such as the houses in which our two protagonists are living. Using SketchUp and the game LifeAfter we tried to rebuild the houses with the furniture in a 3D model to support my multilayer drawing of the projection plane in SketchBook on my tablet.
Last but not least, there is what I actually took the year off for: writing and editing what I have so far. My side project which started in such a high pace almost came to a halt, when I made myself crazy during editing, wanting to include every little new detail I learn about creative writing. In the end I had 5 versions of the character exposition in the first chapter and was utterly confused about which one was good and which not. Lost in artistic writing styles that were not my own, it took me ages to phrase a single paragraph. Luckily, the feedback of one of my closest friends who said that the first version had been the best, helped me to overcome this hurdle. In fact, the first version was the one, where I had not thought about all the rational arguments, but have just written down everything all naturally.
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