All texts that tell a story are letters.
Anyone who tells something imagines another person who wants to know.
I started with stories about my friends, about Melina's habit of picking up the price tags on the pants and the photo film she bought, about Katja's addiction to Duplo, about Oliver's sister and her art, about Claudia's habit of painting her toenails outdoors, on the veranda, near the edge of the forest, from where a deer watched her from time to time.
Dietmar Dath
Editor in the Feuilleton.
Follow I follow
If I had been told back then that writing down such stories is a job, I would have been afraid that someone would ask me how I justify writing down such things, when they really only concern Melina, Katja, Oliver and Claudia.
I now know that enough people like to read other people's letters to completely different people, especially if you hide the salutation and signature and write the whole thing in such a way that it becomes clear that people you don't even know support Melina , Katja, Oliver and Claudia are interested for very different reasons: Because they are similar people to my people and can find out something about themselves in this way, because they are completely different people and can get to know something foreign and exotic while reading, or because the stories are sometimes a little bit of a lie and lying is the best thing about it, but it couldn't live anywhere if I hadn't built a house for it out of lots of details that aren't lies.
Writing only becomes a profession if you don't stop as soon as it gets tiring.
How to start and why, how to continue and why, no writer can say in a way that makes a recipe out of it.
Because if that were possible, the only compensation you get for the fact that the job is sometimes really very tedious would be gone.
That one compensation is worth the effort, though, because it's that every writer has their own unique set of reasons for continuing in their profession, and in writing, more than in most other professions, carrying on means: over and over again start, as if you can't do what you're doing, as if it just hadn't happened before, as if you don't just have to invent what you write,
There really is no recipe, and that is why what is cooked according to this non-recipe tastes so good to some people that they not only eat it but also want to cook it themselves because they think there can never be enough of it.
That's true, by the way, there really can never be enough of them;
even if there are always critics who can't think of anything more original than spitting in.