Other people’s shoes

I had grand ambitions for this blog

I am a grand ambitions kind of person
(secretly, inside my head)

But ambivalence got the better of me and reluctance made me delete what I wrote

I think I thought
(these words are a sort of chorus in my life)
that because I am a writer, and a person whose head is s o f u l l of thoughts,
that words simply would spill out of me
Gush out in arresting articles and striking observations

But maybe my personality is more like that
of those prolific writers who write 800-page master works
but trip over their own words in a simple interview or letter

I do have much to say
But I don’t say it easily

Two other things comes more naturally to me, than writing my thoughts in a blog post:
The first is to listen
(I already know my stories, but I don’t know yours)
The second is to put myself into someone else’s shoes, writing from their point of view and in their voice,
That feels so much easier than staying in my shoes, writing from my point of view and in my voice.

(A little like an actor who readily takes on a character
Breathing life into it, without being shy or timid
But who is, in reality, rather private)

I am too aware of my complexity

Or perhaps I’m just easily perplexed by something that to other people,
really appears quite simple

The Nalmachan King (short story)

 

“Wisdom is counted in silver hairs” a proverb goes. “The whiter the silver, the purer the wisdom,” my grandmother would add.

Her hair was white, and she happily exaggerated her age. Many of the villagers believed her to be ancient, rumours floating around that Old Grema was a hundred and twenty years old, or even older. She had been alive since the legendary war with the Galaini, some claimed, adding that that’s why she preferred wearing her robe in the Galaini style.

Actually, my grandmother only lived to about sixty, but that was ancient enough. It’s a dangerous world. My mother gave birth to fourteen children. Only seven of us lived past the age of five, and four more were claimed by the last war. Few live to have seen several wars, or droughts, or big storms, and tell the tale. We toil all day, working the earth, which seems to drink sweat and blood as greedily as it drinks the rain.

The libraries in the capital are free and open for all, it is true, but time is a treasure the poor cannot afford. And if, like a travelling teacher once told me, knowledge is to be found in the studying of nature, then the problem remains the same. Even when we work every waking moment, we can never produce enough food to live with even a small degree of comfort, or even assurance that it will be enough to last through the winter. There are fewer mouths to feed now, but fewer workers, too. I am too weary when the dark comes in the evening, to have the will to study a flower or pursue its knowledge. I have seen my sister die in childbirth, in a pool of blood. What do I care for the shape of a golden marlip’s leaves?

No, what little wisdom I possess comes almost entirely from one source, and that source was my white-haired Old Grema. I have realized, since her death, that she was even wiser than I gave her credit for. Old Grema, you see, predicted before anybody else that the child king would grow up to be a tyrant.

“He will be known,” Old Grema would say, “as Tarim the Nalmachan. I am perfectly serious. He will be like a tree planted on a plane, with workers weeding and watering around it every day as it grows up. He will grow very tall and very large, and then, when he reaches a certain height, he will become a like the giant Nalmachans.”

At this point the story would sometimes stop, especially if it was light out, and we would gaze over to the forest. You couldn’t see it from the village, but you only needed to wander for an hour or so into the forest before you reached the Nalmachan trees. They are called Nalmachans because they are believed to have originally come from Nalmach, the empire of the giants. The Nalmachan trees, like the people they were named after, were enormous, and though they stood so far from each other you could fit entire fields between them, hardly anything grew there.

“Thirsty like a Nalmachan”, that’s another saying we have; “hungry like a Nalmachan”, too. Even if something did start to grow between the Nalmachans, like the little seedlings that cover the ground in spring, springing up from seeds brought with the wind, it soon withered and died. There was not enough nurture and water in the ground for both them and the enormous Nalmachans.

“Oh yes,” Old Grema would mutter, summoning all attention to herself again. “Believe me, King Tarim will grow tall like a Nalmachan. And do you know what we are? We are the seedlings. The King’s hunger and thirst will only grow – and we will get less and less to sustain ourselves, until finally, we will die and starve.”

If anybody except Old Grema had said it, people would have laughed, but with the widely held belief that she was well past a century old, her words carried a particular weight.

It is spring now. The first harvest is about to be reaped. In a few days time it will be ready, so we all look at the horizon anxiously. We know all too well how quickly a rainstorm can appear, and that if it does, we are better off harvesting the grain now, almost ripe but not at its ultimate point, than we are to see it all go to waste. It was bad when I was little, never a harvest that was big enough and hardly ever a time when I didn’t feel the constant, nagging pain of hunger. But now, with the raised taxes, we struggle to keep the despair at bay. We look at the horizon for rainclouds, and up the hill, for the characteristic glimpse of blue of the backbreakers’ garments. The backbreakers, that’s what they tax collectors are called now, because we have to work until we break our backs in order to produce the merciless amounts they claim. The storm on the horizon or that glimpse of blue – I dread the thought of both. They both mean nothing but despair.

For three years, we have just made it. We have gone hungry, eating every second day during some periods, but we have not starved. But I have eyes. The watchful bird sees not only the fox, but notices the change in the other birds’ song. That’s another proverb Old Grema taught me. The farm further up the hillside, where the soil has more sand – last year they couldn’t produce enough. They had to eat their seed reserve and go to a rich relative to borrow when the time came to sow. The prices were very steep, and they had to sell their land to afford it. Now it’s even worse. The taxes go up every year. And when the day comes and we can’t pay, I shudder to think what will happen.

King Tarim is only a few years older than me. When he came to power, he was only eight. His father and grandfather were bad kings too, but his great grandfather, he was one of the greatest in our history, none other than Velad Carmaltami, Velad Hawk’s Bane.
Old Grema saw King Velad several times with her own eyes and told me that he was a good king because he was a raised as a commoner. His mother was a commoner too, the woman the Old King loved but could not marry, for fear of losing a very important political alliance. It was only when the King grew ill in his older days after a battle wound refused to heal properly, that it became known that had had produced an heir: Velad.

“Velad Carmaltami was a good king,” Old Grema would say, “because he knew what life is like for us little people. But his son, and his grandson, and his great grandson? With each generation they became more removed from our reality. That’s what happens when you grow up in a palace and food is served to you on plates of gold. Each son grew up in comfort, wanting for nothing. But with the child king, ah …”

Old Grema would pause, and then say: “Peace will be his doom.”

“The peace is a blessing from the heavens!” my father would growl, always quick to get angry if someone didn’t properly honour the sacrifice of his three sons who died in battle.

“Do you have any silver hairs?” Old Grema would reply, almost lazily. She trusted in the authority her legendary age gave her. “What do you know? When I was young, I did as you are now doing, you who listen to me. I listened to those with silver hair. And I learned. I learned that times of peace are only appreciated and guarded with wisdom by those who are aware of how costly it is. A soldier who survives the war will be grateful, like you are, my son.”

My father would grunt and look away.

“But a boy who grows up in times where there is no war will be arrogant,” Old Grema said. “That’s why the peace is the King’s doom.”

She was right. Even my father acknowledges that now, now that his own hair is turning silver and the knife of time has carved deep marks in his face. King Tarim, having grown up protected and comfortable and dressed in silks, hearing of pain and war only in the shape of stories, and constantly told he was the the bravest, strongest and most honourable man in the world, only wanted more.

Old Grema said it would start with the taxes. Then revolts and rebellions will follow, and then, a shift of some sort, for better or for worse.

“There might still yet be hope, but don’t be lazy or foolish. Silver hair is a crown rarely given to the undeserving.”

I am still only a young woman, but today as I combed through my hair with my fingers, I found my first grey hair strand. I held it in my hand like a treasure, until it was caught in the wind and disappeared.

–

Short story originally published on my profile on The Prose in early 2017.

Sky to Ourselves (short story)

I am not tired and I am not quite awake. In the distance, the buildings look faint like the remaining traces of an erased drawing. Fabi and Jonte walk silently around the plane, muttering to each other.

The fog lingers, as it always does. Fog is never in a hurry. It hides the beauty of the surrounding mountain peaks, and it doesn’t care.

Fabi stands under a wing and reaches up to unscrew something, I don’t know what. Anyway, it’s limited how long I can stare at Fabi’s plane before it starts resembling a toy, and the leap is short, in my mind, between toy and broken toy. Before I know it, I imagine the airplane tossed aside, like a dead bird with its neck and wings in odd angles.

But there is no way from here to anywhere, except through the air.

“Lilja! Are you keeping warm?”

It’s Jonte calling.

I try to sit up a bit straighter on my suitcase, and I try to smile, because I know I look haggard. The most important thing is that it’s clear that I’ve made up my mind.

“That’s good,” Jonte mutters, but he looks worried.

My body hates the raw, clawing cold. My lungs are crumbled up paper bags filled with rocks. I wrap my arms around my skinny legs. Around us, the fog has lifted ever so slightly. I can see a little further now, and I realize I’ve been absentmindedly looking for birch trees, and the outline of a boathouse, close to the summerhouse.

Inside my stomach, something turns over. No baby – I’m not pregnant, I never will be. But something, nonetheless, almost like another person, another and more sensible me, who wants to let me know I should have never left. I shuffle my feet a little, and dig my chin into my collar. I’m wearing my dad’s old bomber jacket, the one he had when he was a teenager and looked like James Dean. We look nothing alike, he and I, except we’re both blonde and blue-eyed, but that’s Sweden for you. Besides our colouring, we’re very different, not least when it comes to our views on the world. My dad is a small-town guy, not one for adventure. I know I’ve broken his heart.

The bomber jacket doesn’t smell like him anymore, but I’m still glad I stole it. It makes me feel like I have him with me, when the homesickness kicks in with waves of nausea, and I think I’ve made a terrible mistake. Sometimes it’s almost unbearable, how much I miss my family and common everyday things in familiar surroundings, back at our old, whitewashed brick house, in its unkempt garden, or in the summerhouse.

I’ve somehow managed to not give in. I know that when I return, my dad will never take their eyes off me again, or leave me unguarded by an assistant – not for a second.

The brick house where I grew up, back in Sweden, was the only brick house in the street. It always looked slightly weird in amongst all the brightly painted wooden houses. We lived there because my mom was afraid of fire. We had a fireplace, but it was only used if it was so cold there were ice crystals forming on the floorboards – we used gas heating instead.

I remember feeling I’d reached the apex of my teenage rebellion when I snuck a candle into the bathroom and lit it, with my unsteady hands, and then showered without keeping an eye on it. My heart was pounding so hard black dots started floating around in my vision, and I felt the room spinning. But I held out, finished my shower, and then blew out the candle. And I never confessed my crime.

Jonte, or Jonatan, as the non-Swedes call him, was the one who taught me to exchange the word “fear” with the word “respect”. It has taken me a long time, but slowly, I learned no longer to fear fire, but to respect it; to treat it as the wild thing it really is.

I suppose Jonte would be surprised if he heard I learned it from him. He probably doesn’t even recall the conversation. Although he thinks more than anyone I know, he’s not an opinionated person, and he’s notoriously reluctant about giving any kind of advice. When you bring up a topic with him, most often, he’ll give you a broad, rambling, sometimes poetic, sometimes nonsensical reply – and by the time he reaches a conclusion, he’s normally long forgotten what actually started his monologue. But somehow the phrase came up, which has now become my personal anthem that I repeat in my mind when I’m afraid. “Don’t fear the fire – respect it.”

I’ve since started thinking about many other things in the same way. Heights, for example. The ocean. Speed. I prefer when Fabi drives, rather than speed-crazy Jonte. Fabi embodies the same sort of healthy respect for engines and traffic accident statistics and weather forecasts as I do. Well – as I normally do. The fog is an exception. We cannot respectfully go flying on a foggy day such as this, in a rackety little toy plane. The only respectful option was the one that recognized the danger the fog represented, and acted accordingly – by staying on the ground.

But I have always flown in the fog. Ever since I was born. Ever since my mother realized something about me wasn’t quite right, when I was about three months old. I try not to use medical language; it estranges people from me, and goodness knows I am isolated enough as it is. I have a speech impediment that makes it impossible to pronounce even the simplest thing fully. I was born this way, with a lack control over my voice, my tongue and my mouth. I’ll never talk like a normal person. That’s why I love Jonte so much. He’s one of a very small number of people I’ve met who initially understood that despite the way I talk, my mind is perfectly sound.

I can walk and move almost normally, but sometimes my head will roll over, and I easily loose my balance. And I have to sit still, mostly, like now, to make sure my heart rate doesn’t rise dangerously, which it does all too easily. My heart has always been like a ticking bomb – so I’ve overheard it said. (I’ve overheard a great many incredible things, too, because often people talk very freely around me, thinking I can’t understand what they’re saying.) It was flawed metaphor, “ticking bomb”. My heart will never explode. It will simply stop. Maybe when I’m twenty-three. Maybe when I’m twenty-five. Doctor Lindström didn’t think I’d live past five years of age, initially, so I know I’m living on borrowed time.

Jonte and Fabi’s flight checks are finally done. I get up from the suitcase and wrap my arms around myself, as if my dad is here to comfort me. Jonte comes over, asking if I’m ready, which I am.

“Are you cold?”

“A little,” I reply. “And your nose is pink.”

“Is it?” Jonte mumbles. “Lilja, are you sure you want to do this?”

I’ve thought about it very thoroughly. Firstly, I know we must leave from here, because I want to see more of the world – I am terrified that the harsh winter up in the mountain will be more than my body can handle. Secondly, we all know there are no legal options open to us. We can’t fill in forms and write our names down. I am reported missing, and my parents and the Swedish police are working hard to track me down so that I can be kept safe. I’ll live the rest of my life in a cushioned cage, surrounded by guards twenty-four seven.

But that’s far too much to say right now. I lock eyes with Jonte, hoping he can see some of the things on my mind, regardless of how ill I must look.

“Yes, I’m ready,” I say.

Jonte helps me into the plane, and soon we are ready for take-off. Fabi turns on the engine and starts flicking switches. I am sitting in the back, unable to see his face, but I assume he’s rather worried. Being the way he is, though, right now I think he’s more concerned about breaking rules, than about the chance that we might soon be smashed against a mountainside.

When the tower realizes we’re about to leave the ground, they’ll shout at us. So far, they haven’t noticed that we weren’t just checking out the plane, but actually preparing for take-off. Nobody is allowed to fly in this weather, with a storm so close. But, as I argued to Jonte: If we don’t leave now, we could be stuck here for three months. When the snow has fallen, flight traffic all but ceases.

“We’ll be flying blind!” Fabi protested yesterday, when I told him that I wanted to leave the mountains behind. “You realize we could crash into another plane mid-air?”

“She realizes that,” said Jonte, whom I had already convinced. “But she says no other pilots will be stupid enough to fly now. We’ll have the sky to ourselves.”

“You’re insane!” Fabi exclaimed, stomping off in anger.

But he came back a few hours later, muttering, “So where would you wanna go?”

The engine roars, making the airplane rattle. I imagine Tuscany, wondering if it can possibly be sunny or golden at this time of the year. Through the scratched window, the sky seems to loom over us, enormous and heavy. Soon we will be in the midst of it.

The Critic

“That he was also capable, not of malice, but of a certain critical ruthlessness amounting in effect to cruelty, took everyone by surprise.”

Oh, read that again will you? Do these words, their rhythm, the contstruction of the sentence, make you as happy as they make me?

It’s a quote from short story I came across today: “Last Man’s Season” by CK Stead. It was the 2010 winner of The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, and you can read it in full here (just scroll down to 2010). It is also, by the way, words describing the man in the drawing, if you were curious who he was meant to be. If you want to more, I really do suggest reading the short story. I don’t share its worldview, but as a piece of literature, I thought it was quite amazing.

Reading the sentence again, I wonder what it is about it, that is so pleasing. There is something about the exactness, I think; that words are chosen precisely for their meaning, almost as in an academic paper, rather than as a result of the kind of word diarrhea so common among less proficient writers. Of course, I am not above this myself, but what I mean is the difference between, for example, “terribly painful” and “excruciating”.

Anyway. When I read this sentence today, I wanted to share it with you, whoever you are, whenever you are; whenever it is that you come across this post. Then, predictably, I started to ramble a bit, and was surprised to find that the theme of my thoughts of late, very much go hand in hand with the theme of the quote I started with: critical ruthlessness.

Lately, I’ve desired honesty, maybe as a natural result of feeling very confused and lost in this season of my life. That’s why I’ve written no posts in the last month: when I get overwhelmed like that, I generally can’t condense my thoughts into anything but a random, emotional ramble.

Having gotten this far in the post, I stop and look at what I’ve written. I still doesn’t quite ring true. Let me try again.

Maybe I want to appear better than I am. Maybe I’m falling into the selfie trap too, the very thing I would so hate to be true of me: that I’d be caught up projecting the life I wish I lived, focusing more on a pretty facade than on the actual substance of my life. It would be so easy, wouldn’t it, with words.

But I don’t think that’s why I stop myself from being honest, or why I have trouble sharing life when it’s messy. It’s not that I’m a narcissist who wants to appear perfect. It’s that I am an artist who at times feels so riddled with doubt and vulnerability that I become fearful of showing weakness, or exposing a nerve. I start to think that criticism might devastate me. I have enough trouble silencing my own inner critics. I don’t need to add on to that burden.

But I will let you in, anyway. So. Deep breath. Honestly, what is going on in my life?

Besides working a lot, I spend a lot of energy apartment hunting in a different country and in a different language. Being the emotional and introverted person that I am, my mind is continously churning, making mince meat of my ability to focus on seeminly anything. I’m tired constantly, and that, of course, impacts how I feel about my writing. And though I have long since learned not to base my idea of what’s true on my fleeting emotions in the moment, naturally it wears on me, feeling rubbish about something I love so much.

So here I am, currently. I have novel that I love, but that is gathering dust and doubt, and I have a short story which wasn’t good enough to capture the judges’ attention in a competition I entered. I have buckets of questions and frustration, and a banner that reads: “How good am I really?”

It shifts and changes, of course. One moment, the inner critic is eating me up in greedy mouthfuls. The next, I am convinced I am amazing, or, just as often, that I suck, but that I have the potential and the willingness to become amazing, one day, maybe, if I work really hard and don’t give up. And that is a pledge I have made: I will write. Come hail, come storm. I will write. Because I have stories that burn inside my bones, that I am aching to extract, somehow, and turn into words on paper.

Very much an interesting dichotomy.

To finish off, let me tell you about an interesting thought I heard semi-recently: that writer’s arrogance is an intrinsic part of being a writer. Why? Because without some measure of arrogance, you would never have enough confidence to try, or to even think that you could be a writer. Isn’t it funny? I think it is, because for me, this is so true.

Only when I was quite a far way into the pursuit of becoming a writer, did I realize: “Oh wow, I actually suck … and what I know I believed was amazing just a few years ago, I now know is absolute garbage.” And yet some amount of arrogance has to remain. You have to keep thinking you are better than you are – at least for some tiny minority of the time, when you’re not busy thinking you’re a miserable idiot to even set aside time to do something so silly as write on a novel. I know, I know – we writers are like that. Ruthless critics of ourselves. Hopefully we are more sympathetic towards others.

Love, Randi

PS: If you have any recommendations for really well-writen short stories, please let me know!

Deep Dives & Realism

A little while ago, I put down “The Guest Cat” by Takashi Hiraide, which I was reading, and asked myself: What does Hiraide do particularly well?

“The Guest Cat”, if you don’t know it, is a lovely, quiet book, originally written in Japanese, the cover of which was so bedazzled with reviewer’s flattery that I actually did my best not to read it. It’s like those youtube videoes that have in their title “you won’t be able to stop laughing”.

But I’d been wanting to read it for a long time, and once I was able to push away all the insisting voices shouting at me how wonderful it was, I did find that I liked it. But then, this isn’t a review. This is just me talking about something I think Hiraide does well in it.

The characters in “The Guest Cat” are few, and provided with hardly any backstory at all. They just are. A married couple. How they met was perhaps mentioned with five words. No description of their appearance. And the story is told from a vantage point sometime in the future, which makes the way memory works influence the way the story is told. Rather than giving an overload of detail, as one might when describing a character presently (or in the historical present) in a specific room, this story is told from memory. Several times, phrases such as “as I remember it” come up, and most of the story takes place in little episodes, where the things that haven’t stuck to the narrator’s memory,  have been omitted.

All the same, the book is rich with specific detail and at times, it dives deep into this or that topic. This struck me as especially significant to the overall impact of the story.

These little “deep dives” include passages on, to name three examples: the story of the building where most of the story takes place, the intricacies of the current housing market in Japan (where the story takes place), and in a particular, unusual form of painting. Now why is this important?

I think, with a subdued, minimalist writing style, it is easy to go too far, thus ending up with a story that is not so much “gentle strokes” as it is too brittle to fly .Mind you, the minimalism is brilliant, thanks in part to the specific details. In a way, I think it is a kind of minimalism that things are specific – because if they really happened, as is what you’re asking the reader to believe, why go through the trouble of generalizing? For the actual narrator, it would be just as easy to say that the cat ate dried mackerels, or whatever it was, than, vaguely, “food”.

Anyway, moving on to the deep dives. They provide, I think, necessary ballast and realism, providing counter-measures when the reader is at risk of becoming lost or distracted, either because the topic/situation/setting/place the narrator is discussing or finding himself in, is too unfamiliar and vague. After all, even a stylistically elegant, aloof reference can risk giving the impression that the writer doesn’t know what he or she is talking about.

Maybe the main reason why this occurs to me, is because I’ve done just that. Constantly delving into the exciting and unknown with my stories, I often found myself out of my depth when it came to my ability to pull it off convincingly. I could not convincingly write about the specifics (since they were unknown to me) nor about the generics (since it became obvious that I was just trying to avoid something I didn’t know anything about; this was especially evident in dialogue).

The crucial point is this: You have to be pretty amazing at this writing thing, to write a story well, which contains major plot elements which you know nothing about, have no personal experience with and/or have not researched. You may get away with it at times, but especially in story told in a minimalist writing style, you’ll occasionally have to do deep dives.

Some reasons why, that I can think of:

A, to create interest. A story which only contains elements I’m thoroughly familiar with, won’t interest me. There has to be something interesting. A place, a concept, an idea, a context. Preferably more. And to introduce something unfamiliar to the reader, you simply have to take a bit more than half a sentence.

B, to create realism. Rather than risk being lost of confused by the unfamiliar element, you are made to understand, and so you follow along further into the world of the story, more than before since you have now taken steps away from your own familiar world, and dived into the world of the story, which has other elements as well as those you’re familiar with.

C, to build trust. When the reader discovers that the writer has done his job thoroughly in specific, carefully chosen deep dives, he or she will, I suspect, be willing to suspend disbelief in a different way from that point onwers. The writer may then approach other topics and barely explain them at all, even if they too are confusing, because the reader now won’t think “oh, he’s trying to cover up that he doesn’t know too much about this” (like I would if reading a shortstory about a lawyer, written by a teenager), but rather might think “the narrator for some reason doesn’t find this worth explaining too much”, allowing that to inform his or her view of the narrator’s chracter, or something like that.

That’s all for now. Musings and thoughts about something I thought Takashi Hiraide, writer of “The Guest Cat”, does well.

If you haven’t read the book yet, then please do. And if you are passionate about the book industry, please pay actual money for it. If you, like me, wish the book industry was doing better – then put your money where your mouth is.

All the best,

Randi

Rats (behind the scenes)

I posted the short story Rats a little while back, and now I’d like to share some of the “behind the scenes” stuff behind it. My motivation for doing this is because I find it interesting, and so maybe you will too, and maybe we can inspire each other.

Rats is a short story responding to the prompt “you are the victim of injustice” on TheProse.com, where I originally posted the story. Not for the first time, I was inspired by the amazing Kazuo Ishiguro, and specifially, by the notion of approaching the concept an alternative world a little bit differently.

So that was the first impulse, or piece of inspiration, if you like.

The second was a video I’ve seen where the experience of a refugee child is portrayed using a white child actress, thereby brilliantly confronting the idea of “us” and “them”, forcing Westerners to take in a) that all humans are alike, and b) that it could so easily have been us. The world could have looked different. Indeed, the world might look different in the future.

This idea fascinated me. It may not surprise you to hear that I support the statement “Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.”

And so I decided to go with the idea that the East grows to become the new super power, whereas the West diminishes and becomes poor, factories now being built in the West just like right now, they are in the East, because that’s where cheap labour is.

There is also a historical reference within Rats, namely the factory collapse in Savar, Bangladesh in 2013. I have visited Bangladesh once, and met the people there, and I have Bangla friends. They might as well have been Westerners, in some senses, but they live in a country which is extremely poor, which has an incredibly corrupt government, and which is exploited by international organizations. A large number of people lost their lives or were fatally wounded in that building collapse. But who talks about it now? And though “conscious fashion” is a growing trend I wholeheartedly support, it remains true that most people go shopping without it even crossing their minds who made these clothes, and whether they were exploited, or what we can do to better their working conditions and pay.

I am by no means a very structured writer who has a strict plan and writes from the beginning to the end making no detours. Indeed, I am a very messy writer who constantly shuffles things about and tweaks them, thinking of stories as pieces of clay that I can mould into whatever shape I like. What I’ve been talking about before, then, is not so much the short story itself, but the impulses behind the idea. In summary: they are these three:

• The idea of approaching an alternative world differently
• The refugee child video campaign challenging the “them/us” idea
• The factory collpase in Bangladesh i 2013

Now we get to the short story, about which I don’t have that much to say. I wrote it quickly – those of you who are writers will know that some stories seem to write themselves.

The factory collapse in Rats happen right by the Thames in London, which was my attempt at turning things on their head, enganging with the idea “them” and “us”, by actually swapping the geographical locations and cultures that provided the setting for the factory collapse. But I didn’t want to linger on this for too long. Inspired by Ishiguro, I wanted the world of the story to simply be, and to focus on what was happening with my characters and in their lives – as they experienced it, not as you or I would.

The protagonist is a regular woman, in most ways. A Londoner recognizable in some ways, but whose world is in many aspects strikingly different from the way we know it. When catastrophe happens, she becames the newspaper cover girl, the face of the disaster, who has to deal with exactly the same problems as we do, in the real world, except from an opposite point of view.

She wants and desires change, but history’s message is not encouraging, and she fears that the Westerner’s roles as “rats” will mean that the disaster will soon be forgotten in the East. But in the woman’s own life, the disaster will in all probability cripple the entire family, because the media and the wealthy people of the world, only care for as long as their attention span lasts.

I wonder if some people might accuse me of writing for the sake of a “moral message”. Actually, I don’t, certainly not on purpose. I think my inclination is to attempt to get people to think more, and to step out of their own shoes and into somebody else’s.

Movie of the Day

About ten years ago, I invented a creative writing exercise called “Movie of the Day”.

Well, I say “invented”. Really, I don’t remember quite how it started, and I dare say there are many variations of this exercise round and about. What I remember is why it started: with the fear of running out of ideas, or forgetting how to make up stories. Or, more precisely, fear of ever becoming intimidated at the prospect of starting a new story.

My creative writing exercise is not intended to produce great things. I think that’s important to stress, because the pressure we put on ourselves to create amazing things can become so much we don’t even start. This exercise, then, is simply intended to keep the imagination at work, making you actively engaging in creating a story.

I’m a picky movie-watcher known to walk out from family movie nights – for the simple reason that some idea had popped into my mind, that interested me much more than the movie. Numerous times I’d be scanning the shelves of DVD’s in my parents’ house (how sad to think the era of DVD’s might be fast approaching an end), finding nothing at all that I wanted to watch. And that, I think, is where this exercise really started – as I asked myself: What are the ingredients of a movie I would want to watch?

In periods, I’d do this once a day, minimum. I’d open my notebook, and write down any and all elements I’d like to see in a movie.

An example of a page like this would be:

Old china cutlery. Loft. Dusty caught in sunlight. Raspy voice. Maybe someone who’s lost their voice (why would that matter? why is her voice important.) No squeaky clean, unrealistic apartments – mess, life, the oddness of the ordinary. The real world-ish, but not quite. Something’s off. What could that be? Also: Drums. A really good, riveting beat, like enormous drums.

And then I’d work from there.

Another way I do it is I pick five interesting images with no obvious correlation, and force myself to somehow create a story using those elements.

Or I’d draw.

I’ve always drawn freehand. Before I ever fell in love with words, I loved storytelling through imagery. My gateway into loving stories was actually cartoons drawn by old masters, such as Hal Foster and André Franquin. I’ve always drawn people, wondering who they are and what their stories are, approaching it a bit like people-watching, really.

I might be writing into an empty void right now, but I hope that with time, more and more writers and story-lovers will happen upon my little corner of the internet. But anyway, I drew this drawing in order for others to participate in exactly what I have just described: to make up a new story.

Within this piece of art, there are numerous elements for you to explain, explore, and piece together. There is the three girls. Who are they? Where are they from and what is their background? Have they known each other for a long time? What has happened to them? Where are they? Are they far from home, or close? What’s going on outside the frames of this picture? What are they talking about? Do they agree or disagree with one another?

And please, please let me know in the comments what you come up with – I’d love to know.

On a final note: Personally, I don’t know what this drawing really portrays. I don’t know if it’s a beginning, middle or end, and there is no “right answer” here. But I definitely have a skeleton of a story that has started to take shape.

Wounded Panther

“She locked herself in her room, refused to eat or drink, and when at last he persuaded her to open the door, first with threats and then with poorly dissimulated pleading, he found a wounded panther who would never be fifteen years old again.”

Quote from “Love in the Time of Cholera” (Original title: “El amor en los tiempos del cólera”) by Gabriel García Márquez.

I read this book in Norwegian, and could not find the quote in English with a corresponding page number. In the Norwegian version it was on page 99.