New Beginnings

We are all set. Previous inspirations ran out of sand and flashed into the sad river of forgetfulness. Now, with a fresh mind, we can start thinking about the next chapters of a new book. It always starts like this; it always will be.

Embarking on a quest to write a fiction book is not easy. First of all, you have to have that subject you’ll write about for the next few months in the back of your mind. Or at least a vague structure of it. That entails choosing a genre, deciding on characters, setting, and a plot. That means a lot of planning.

It used to come naturally. This decadent atmosphere of all these lazy hours filled with smoke and sweat and waiting for Godot. When he finally came, there was no mercy; we had to serve to his wants and desires, we had to comply. I believe these days are gone.

When you write a significant amount of fiction based partially on your own life, matters deeply important in your life materialise in words. Once they do that, they struggle to come out in the same form again. They swirl around, beating around the bush and knocking on the wrong door. It takes more time and effort to find them behind any obvious inspiration. It means digging deeper to find meaning.

It helps to change surroundings and rest a bit. It helps to think differently. It helps to find a new subject, away from your own life, and to softly plunge into it as if it were a wave taller than the tallest skyscraper. It helps to breathe underwater as if it weren’t water at all, just a different oxygen mask provided to us in the meantime, while we weren’t looking.

We have to prepare the essentials. Buy various flavours of tea and coffee, and make sure our selection of cookies and crackers supplies us throughout the next run. Buy new shoes to serve as a signal that our walks are important to this quest.

Because, however it looks at it, it is a marathon. Carefully prepared and scheduled to the last detail. Not entirely on paper, maybe not in a thick table created with Excel, but still existing in our minds, hatching slowly in warmth, like a chick poking its head and shyly saying, Hello.

The hatching process includes a lot of subconscious work. Real people and facts got tangled up in an invisible dance, like couples on a dancefloor. They know that they are dancing, but at the end of the competition they may end dancing with a different partner. It happens when they get mixed up, while reality, per se, is not serving fiction. Then it has to be abandoned, and a new world conquered. That’s inevitable. What doesn’t serve has to go away forever.

The others will think different things. That we are engaging in every contest our characters engage in. Like selling drugs, for instance. Or killing people. In reality, they don’t know; we sit at the table and continuously search the internet. We read books and watch movies that have similarities, or sometimes not, to the world we are creating on the screen of our laptop. They may have no idea how it’s done, but they’re convinced of their truths. They have the right to err, just as we have the right to create. They will never know how we’ve done that, even if we’ve explained it to them to the last meticulous detail.

And there is, of course, solitude. Wanted more than ever. Escape into solitude felt good for a long while, while people stayed absent from our lives. They eradicated themselves by being nasty or unavailable, which in many cases may be the same thing. We understood one fact—that writing books required complete solitude and safe detachment from the world. I think we achieved that goal to the full.

It's time to wrap it up and say, "What’s done is done; what’s before us will happen eventually."

We have to wait for the next story to unfurl fully and show its feathers.