“Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.”
– Hugh MacLeod, cartoonist

And in the terminology of Hugh MacLeod, there’s only one thing worse than thinking your box of crayons is good, and that’s knowing it is – ‘cause knowledge, that kind of knowledge, is what makes it impossible to put them away.

I’ve been writing (in the writing sense of the word) since I was ten. That’s when I first realised there were people who actually thought it interesting to read what I wrote – something that’s pretty damn cool when you’re an attention-seeking preteen. My first story was a fantasy story, heavily inspired by the television show Charmed. It’s funny how you think you’ve got something that’s simply amazing, and then, when you look at it nearly twelve years later, it’s just crap. Landet i det fjerne (‘The Country in the distance’) was a series of novels, thirty-four pages long, handwritten, each novel seventeen pages long. The story revolves around a princess, Rosa, and a farmer’s son, Christian, who happens to turn out to be the love of her life. Originally thought to be a trilogy, the story is seventeen pages short. I guess, in that sense, in all its incompleteness, it sort of foreshadowed my entire writing carrier to come. Rosa and Christian never got their firstborn daughter Mia back; the story never got to end well. Happy endings have apparently never, neither consciously nor subconsciously, been my thing.

From age ten to 18, fantasy’s everything my words revolved around. In retrospective, I’ve got no idea why – it’s plain obvious to see I had no talent for it whatsoever – but maybe it’s a good thing that I took my time to realise this (and time it took(!)), for now that I know I can’t write fantasy to save my life, I can happily move onto other genres and let those who actually have potential in this genre do their thing. From age 18 to 20, I must have seemed a pathless fountain of words, throwing them here and there and everywhere, working on basically every genre there is, though clearly favouring the noir and, as I got older and first encountered Hanif Kureishi (current Personal Jesus) and later Niven Govinden, slowly started warming up to the idea of writing something that was actually, well, void of anything supernatural.

Had you asked me two years ago when I was dragging my brain through countless Kureishi short stories in school if I’d ever think I’d end up where I am these days, I’d have told you ‘Fuck no’. In that sense, we started off on the wrong foot, Hanif and I. It wasn’t until my English teacher suggested I wrote my final Upper Secondary Levels report on The Black Album (which it took me ten out of fourteen writing days to just read (as I constantly had to stop up and ask myself ‘Why, oh why, did I put myself through this?’)) that I had what I might refer to as ‘an epiphany’. For on page 119, lines four and five, everything changed. For all I know, the world stood still. Six billion people could’ve held their breath and died and I wouldn’t have even noticed.

‘Without losing her soul she was turning herself into pornography.’

It’s funny how one line can make you change your entire opinion about everything. That line’s the one that did it for me, the one that sparked it all: firstly, my sudden interest in a writer whose books I had hated with a fiery passion up until then; secondly, the books themselves; thirdly, this is the first time I encountered a line I’d literally give my life for if only it’d mean I’d written it (inspiring my current obsession with Lines I’d give my life for); and finally, it left me with the desire to write a line (and if nothing more than one line, so be it) where my reader (and if nothing more than one reader, then fine) would pause and feel so completely and utterly speechless and in awe as I was when I read that one. I think, on page 119, Hanif Kureishi showed me what a real writer does. In his novel Intimacy, he finally helped me verbalise it, too, and what the sole purpose for my own writing is –

‘I want an absolute honesty that doesn’t merely involve
saying how awful one is. How do I like to write? With a
soft pencil and a hard dick – not the other way around.‘

If only I was a guy so the male ending stuck. Oh well, I guess you can’t have it all…