At the age of eleven, I made a momentous decision. I had emptied the lending library of our neighborhood, including the children's book "Harriet the Spy" (German edition: "Harriet: Spionage aller Art") by Louise Fitzhugh. It tells of eleven-year-old Harriet in New York who - planning to become a writer - keeps a diary and regularly hides in the dish elevator of her parents' apartment to eavesdrop on adult conversations. The perceptive Harriet reports on their strange and contradictory behavior and also notes unfl attering things about her classmates. When the diary falls into their hands, Harriet is bullied and ostracized, and I realized: to be a writer is to possess a powerful weapon. Words can do a lot. They can describe, embellish, obscure, and expose. They can comfort and delight, but they can also destroy and hurt. They can transport the reader into a foreign world, open his eyes or make him cry. Words – spoken, written or read – can actually make a diff erence. When I closed that book, I knew I wanted to be a writer.
Today, more than fi ft y years later, I'm still surprised that my childhood career aspiration came true (and wonder what happened to Harriet – a writer, too?). Fortunately, as the author of nearly thirty books now, I've received considerably more encouragement than rejection. Both may have to do with the fact that I write what is commonly called "light fi ction". The supposedly light fi nds a large audience, but in Germany, where the distinction between genre fi ction and literary fi ction is stubbornly adhered to, it is still regarded with a certain condescension by a minority.
Many people secretly dream of writing – not necessarily as a profession, but rather as a vocation. How do you say it? Beget a child, plant a tree, write a book. To be creative.
When I closed that book, I knew I wanted to be a writer.
To create something that goes beyond one's own existence, something that lasts. Alternatively: Simply hold on to one's own memories, for the children, the grandchildren, nieces and nephews. Because one has lived in the East, and the East has perished. Because one has experienced things about which one cannot speak, but perhaps write. Because you have worked all your life, and now fi nally want to pursue your passion. Or simply because you want to entertain others, make them laugh and marvel. Just as one is made to laugh and marvel by reading.
The dream of writing is just as widespread as the shyness of doing it. Writing a book sounds like something big. Like something you don't just do, but something you have to fi ght hard for and earn. Don't we all admire writers who oft en spend years or decades working doggedly on a single work, like the American author Donna Tartt, who began her fi rst book, "The Secret History", while still a student in the early 1980s, which was fi nally published in 1992 and became a world bestseller? Her next work appeared ten years later, and again a decade later came her novel "The Thistle Finch," for which she won the Pulitzer Prize.
Or let's think of J.K. Rowling and her seven Harry Potter volumes, masterpieces of dramaturgical construction that were written over long periods in English cafés, where the penniless single mother took refuge to save on heating costs. Did she know then that her perseverance would one day pay off and she would become a world star? Other authors also distinguished themselves by escalating delivery deadlines - there is a legend about German post-war writer Wolfgang Koeppen ("Das Treibhaus", english "The Greenhouse) that he asked for (and received) new advances from Suhrkamp publisher Siegfried Unseld for years because he was allegedly always just about to complete his next work - which never came.
Many people imagine the life of a writer to be romantic. You are sitting under an olive tree in Tuscany, gazing dreamily over the landscape (which perhaps Goethe already saw on his Italian journey) and waiting for the muse's kiss. As soon as that happens, you start writing, and a few bottles of red wine later, the book is finished. So much for the cliché. In reality, writing as a profession is quite a laborious activity. You struggle to come up with ideas, fight – if you are blessed with a family – for undisturbed working time, struggle with deadlines, finding titles and designing covers. And that's only if you're an author in the comfortable position of having a publisher.
After the book is published, if everything goes well, you go on a reading tour, which is also an ambivalent pleasure. On one hand, after months or years of solitary writing, it's wonderful to finally meet your readers, to exchange ideas with them, and to experience the impact of your own text. But to read and sign for two hours night after night in some place, you are on the road for days or even weeks. In the process, you not only have the opportunity to study the deplorable state of Deutsche Bahn and its route network at length, but also to get to know places that you had no idea existed (sometimes for good reason).
Along the way, one completes a career as a hotel tester in the three-star category, because since the triumph of Amazon, most booksellers are struggling to stay afloat and keep their costs down. Even the vast majority of authors can barely live off the proceeds of their works; they have to supplement their income with readings, articles, radio plays and the like, or even work a regular breadand- butter job. Only very few achieve bestseller status or are recognized in the feature pages of major newspapers.
And yet people dream of writing. And come, if they have found their way to us, to one of the writing workshops that my husband, screenwriter and author Peter Probst, and I have been leading since 2018. In beautiful, inspiring places like Munich, Formentera, Mallorca, southern France or the Gräflicher Park wellness resort in Bad Driburg, where the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and his lover Susette Gontard ("Diotima") spent a few happy weeks in 1796. When Susette's husband, a Frankfurt banker, found out about the affair, he threw Hölderlin, the tutor, out on his ear, which broke the heart of both the poet and his beloved. So impressive is the setting of this unhappy love that our participants repeatedly write wonderful texts in which they are inspired by the fate of the two.
The other locations of our workshops also provide special ideas - for example, as an exercise on the Balearic island of Formentera, one participant had an old leather bag on the beach speak, observing the bathing beauties and grieving that they no longer pay attention to her. She described her sorrow in such a touching and endearing way that the inconspicuous bag literally came to life and became a personality.
Writing is not only contemplation of the world, but always a journey into one's own inner self. The term self-awareness is frowned upon for understandable reasons; too many charlatans have discredited it through dubious practices. Nevertheless, it describes what actually happens to us continuously, and is ultimately the starting point for all writing. For if someone does not experience and reflect upon himself or herself, how is he or she to perceive the world around him or her?
Most people who start writing therefore initially draw from the reservoir of their own memories. In our workshop, participants dive down into their past by means of a guided thought journey, become the children or young people they once were again, and remember. They remember their first encounter with an animal, a great joy or disappointment, their first love. And all at once that past comes alive in every detail, suddenly they feel the scratchy sweaters their grandmother knitted them on their skin, smell the smell in their kitchen, remember the softness of the rabbit they were given for their fifth birthday. Their senses are sharpened, they experience a firework of impressions – and the participants already start writing. And suddenly it's gone, the blockade that has held them back so far, the shyness that has kept them from simply getting started. The participants in our workshops are surprised by themselves and surprise us and the group when, within a few days, the floodgates open and a great desire to tell, revise, read aloud and discuss breaks out, often especially in those who were initially shy.
Writing can be many things. Sheer fun in storytelling, critical self-questioning, trying things out and experimenting, calling into the room and noticing the response. Each participant arrives with their own stories and leaves with their own personal treasure of new writing experience and a bulging toolbox.
Not all workshop participants become professional writers, but here and there we can provide useful suggestions or even the decisive impetus. One participant who had taken two of our workshops presented us with an idea for a nonfiction book that we found so compelling that we advised and coached her beyond the courses. We discussed the concept with her, edited her synopsis, gave her advice on finding an agency. When her book was finally published by a renowned publisher, she said that it was with us that she had the brilliant idea of the dramaturgical principle she wanted to use to structure it, and that without us she would never have found the courage to write it anyway. As I type these lines, I'm looking at the non-fiction bestseller list, where her book has just entered, at number 7. And I have to admit, I'm a bit proud.
Written by Amelie Fried
www.ameliefried.de
