In school, I did not think much of writing. It was a tedious but necessary task (unlike German classics the curriculum required me to read, which were mostly just tedious). That changed during an academic year I spent abroad, reading “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy in my American Writers class. Not only did its minimalist style appeal to me, but also the post-apocalyptic setting and the few but well-devised characters.
However, it took me another four to five years until I acknowledged writing as an artistic device I could utilize myself. By then, I had written mostly songs and poems, which gradually faded into poetic prose, short stories, longer stories, and eventually novels. It was like an addiction, and I spent so much time on it that I began to neglect my other responsibilities, such as friends, my studies, or nightly sleep. I remember once when I was so in the flow that I wrote an entire 40-page chapter for my novel “Regine” during a 16-hour session, not even taking a five-minute break to enjoy my sorry instant ramen with fresh garlic. I broke that record several times over, and it did not yield the best pages I ever wrote, but it was fun, and at the time, I was happy with the results.
There were times in my life when I considered giving it all up to become a full-time writer, but I realized that being dependent on writing could take all the romance out of it. Besides, the competition is a lot stiffer than for specialized engineers. While I do not think that you should wait with the writing until you are old (because you should practice, make errors, improve, […]), I did postpone the publishing part for later, maybe out of fear of becoming a full-fledged writer by accident.
Writing is cheap and very efficient for the author but somewhat less efficient for the consumer. Compare writing with producing a movie, for example, which requires hundreds of people to join forces, is a lot harder to make, and easier to consume. Its underlying screenplay could be written by one person. On a side note, writing a screenplay is still on my list; I have a couple of killer ideas. Just like any other creator, I have a lot more ideas than time to pursue them. Most of these ideas are going to end up in my writing because if I do not have enough time to do them justice, I can at least describe them and use them to make my stories more original and interesting.
Over the years, I grew a little bored with writing novels and mere short stories because I felt that I repeated myself, something I try to avoid as much as possible. Besides, it was difficult to integrate into my daily life, to keep myself motivated whenever I had an hour for myself and sat down to write. I procrastinated forever, then wrote too much in one session, and lay awake at night plotting, trading in sleep and mental health for massive cerebral fireworks. It seems like I never forget an important thought overnight because everything is seamlessly integrated into the concept. I love the dynamics of how a novel constructs itself, while the author oscillates between thinking and writing at a shifting frequency.
Paradoxically, it became too much of an obligation, even though the pressure was not big enough because I was only obliged to myself. Fortunately, writing can encompass a lot more than writing novels, short stories, or plays. As I improved my programming skills, so did my understanding of language on a “molecular” level. While I was working on my text adventure game Anima X (which is more game than text and thus categorized elsewhere), I had the notion that my personal era of writing static, old-fashioned stories was ultimately over. Too amazing was the experience of writing dynamic dialogs which consider the players’ choices, the state they are in, and allow for hundreds of variations for even single lines of dialog due to synonyms, modular sentence structures, and pseudo-randomness.
During my late 20s, I discovered a more static text type by myself: constrained writing: experimental texts devised from limited sets of words. For example, you use programming to look for words that fulfill a particular criterion, like words whose letters are in alphabetical order. Then you categorize these words and compose entire texts with them. Perhaps constrained writing is my final goodbye to the mainstream and hello to the avant-garde, but it fulfills me and is more compatible with my other obligations because I only need to maintain the same style for a few days as opposed to the weeks + months + years it takes to write a novel. By the way, all these texts are continually being added to my open-access collection “Love–Violence–Algorithms.”
My favorite authors include (but are not limited to): Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Anthony Burgess, William Burroughs, Michael Ende, Gillian Flynn, Ken Follett, Jonathan Franzen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Noah Gordon, Joe Haldeman, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Ken Kesey, Stanisław Lem, Isaac Marion, George R. R. Martin, Richard Matheson, Cormac McCarthy, Brandon McNulty, Stephenie Meyer, Karen Ollrogge, George Orwell, Chuck Palahniuk, Patrick Rothfuss, Joanne K. Rowling, Rainer M. Schröder, J. R. R. Tolkien, Kurt Vonnegut.