Writing struggles.
In the past years, I haven’t been able to find a real univocal direction in my writing*, and the only successful story I ever wrote was about how unsuccessful a writer I am**. Was it because not being able to write, having the writer’s block was the only tangible reality I could write about? Maybe it was the only concept I could successfully put into writing becuase the closest thing to writing is for me the inability to do so?
I mean, I’m not lacking the stories! I have lots of stories in my suitcase! A love story, the story of my family and about single characters I know. I have enough imagination to write, for example, about dinosaurs in the 1900s or about a girl who realized she could take pictures in her night dreams and develop the photos when she was awake… And I have the humour and cynicism to make the stories lively enough***.
I may have a few burdens, such as privacy problems (but I can always use a pseudonym) or fear of being discovered in my innermost feelings by people who know me, or fear of offending the people I write about, whether I use their name or not. As most people I write about are people I would never want to offend. Sometimes I feel that the problem is that I am addressing the wrong reader. Or that I am not thinking of a reader at all. Whatever the problem, the limits and burdens, I have got to find a way to write something at least I will like! Because the feeling of having written something I love is so pleasant and I cannot do without it for much longer!
So I am trying all kinds of styles, targets and stories.
And after years of unsuccessful female protagonists I thought that maybe my character should be a male. I am thinking of a story whose main structure is: a boy lives a CRAZY LIFE while desperately looking for a girl he cannot have. And when he can have her, they die. A very obvious ending, as love and death are really close to one another. Just like love and hatred. Just like happiness and death, like orgasm and death. As perfection almost does not exist in real life****, where can it be if not in death? Death is surely very very far from perfection, but human perception sees as perfect anything that tends to infinity and infinity sounds closer to death than to life. I die, I meet infinity. Infinity is a very high pitch sound that goes on and on, beyond the stars and the universe. And that is why my two characters die when they finally find eachother. If we don’t want them to die, well fine, we can say that they’re already dead. Like in the Master and Margherita. Because their love is so perfect that it cannot exist, because it implies no more struggle. And what is life without a littlebit of struggle? Living in perfection is boring if you are alive! Life is so many things and we search perfection while running away from it at the same time. We never find real fulfilment and it’s terrible and necessary at the same time. As far as I am concerned, I am scared of success, but I pursue perfection though art, since I can’t possibly reach it in any other way. And then my book would have a whole lot of characters talking about music, about social problems I really really feel, about hypocrisy, about anti-Semitism even. Things I know something about.
I am looking for truth, but I know that is a little too vague*****. So I could be looking for roots******.
It is late and i must sleep now. Why don’t you just make things easier for me and tell me what you would like me tell you? which one of my stories would you like to hear? I promise, you will not be disappointed, you will laugh and think and if i really really feel like it i will also make you cry.
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* creative writing, that is
** And by success I don’t mean being published or having fans. One fan is enough for me to regard myself as successful. But unfortunately, it must be a very specific fan. It must be me. I am a successful writer when I read over and feel something nice about my writing.
*** This can actually be a limit. Or the symptom of a limit. I cannot really express pain in writing, especially if I know somebody else will read my stuff.
****Speaking of perfection, at times I think that perfect is either nothing or everything. Sometimes I think that the reality before my eyes is perfect, if it weren’t for a whole variety of accessories that ruin this perfection. Which means that everything has something perfect in it, be it happy or sad, and all I as an artist would have to do would be remove the imperfections from perfection, erase or cross out what hinders perfection from expressing itself. Subtractive art starting from reality. Visual haiku. A world to be explored.
***** I think I know where truth is, truth meaning the meaning of the meaning of life. Just so you know, I have never found truth but I know what to look for and when truth will walk past me, I will know how to recognize it. Truth cries and laughs and has a big belly but eats nothing. Truth has a real piano and a real forte and a real mezzo forte and it has many colours and many tones and many pitches and each one of them is just right, perfect for itself and what for it means to mean. It uses all the words in the vocabulary but it sounds like it’s using ten words. Unlike reality. Reality eats and smokes and takes drugs to forget itself.
******Too many people have done it before, but it could be an idea. If I were indeed looking for roots, I would be looking for my grandfather’s Berlin or for my great great grandfather’s shoe shop if he even had one. Or for my great grandfather’s cheese factory. What for, though? Looking for roots gets stagnant, stale sticky, sugary, boring, especially because whenever I look for roots I find them in no time, and if I’m still writing about them after I have found them I get really really bored of them.
