Writing has always been something I've enjoyed. I guess this is why I chose journalism as my first profession, and the reason why I kept writing throughout my career as an academic and a communication consultant, and later as a product manager (doing lots of copy work).

When my mental health issues got into the way, I turned to writing as a way to process things. Keeping a journal every day, I soon learned, was the single most powerful therapeutic method to make sense of the situation I was going through. It was also a way to get to know more about myself, my values, fears, aspirations, boundaries. I have not stopped writing since.

Yet, something changed in my relationship to writing after I visited Andalusia on my first solo vacation earlier this year. As if a secret door has opened up inside of me, one that has been locked for a very long time. As soon as I arrived to Sevilla, I felt this urge to just write, write, write. But not just anything. I wanted to write a story about friendship. You know, that kind of friendship that withstands all the ups and downs in life, all the big transitions and personal growth that we go through, individually and sometimes jointly.

I also figured that if I wanted to become a fiction writer one day, I needed to learn how to write. Or rather, become much, much better at it.  

One evening during my trip, I randomly walked into an old bookstore in Lisbon (the place that I visited thereafter). And there it was, this thick book, starring back at me from the top of the shelf, inviting me to do just that. A practical guide on fiction writing! A sign from the universe?

I bought the book and spent the rest of my trip reading it, analyzing the examples and highlighting the passages that I found important and that I wanted to keep in mind as I sat down in the mornings to work on my chapters.

I soon came to realize that writing fiction is much harder than I thought and that it requires a lot of practice. (So much appreciation for all my favorite and less favorite authors out there!)

But so does reading. To be able to catch the dynamic interplay between words and sentences, the build-up of characters, the complexity of dialogues, the atmosphere that gets created with small little details in the descriptions, etc. means that you need to learn to become a pretty damn good reader, too.

I guess that up until now I have never really thought about this very aspect. But it explains why Zadie Smith talks about her desk being “covered with open novels” as she immerses herself in her own writing:

“I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.” — Zadie Smith

I like Zadie’s approach. I think it would be foolish to believe that reading other people’s work while working on your next short story or novel, or poem doesn’t help to improve your writing. Or maybe worse, that it distracts you and lets you loose your “voice.” If anything, I believe it can be a great source of motivation that pushes you to work even harder on finessing your work.  

Writing and reading always go hand in hand. In order to become better at writing, you certainly need to practice (and eventually master) both.  

As far as my own writing process goes, I’m not sure whether my story will ever get finished, yet alone published. But that’s not the point.

What I get to appreciate at this moment is the playfulness that comes with choosing the right-fitting words, the images and songs that run through my head as I think about a specific scene in the story, the emotions that come up as I’m writing about a difficult period in one of the main characters' life, and whether I’ve managed to make it sound at least a tiny bit relatable to a potential reader.

I have also become a more attentive reader, more mindful of what the author is trying to say or explain. Sometimes I even try to imagine what she or he must have gone through in “real life” to be able to make this or that observation, or to translate that experience so elegantly to a complete stranger like me.

I also find it so liberating that, for once, I don’t need to worry about the outcome. Rather, I’m just enjoying this creative process while learning along the way, both as a reader and as a writer.

Kindly,

Neva.