9th November 2006 – HCMC
After a break of nine days, I am back to writing again. After the last entry to the blog, I only write a letter to C and a half page beginning for a new short story. Yesterday evening I stopped working at 4 pm and started to work on writing in Turkish for almost two hours. I realized that this is the only way I can keep writing since it is almost impossible to write at home. J wants to talk with me once I return home and this is the only right thing I can do. I can not blame her for feeling lonely or loving me. Actually, I must be thankful to her for being so patient with me.
Whenever I start writing a new short story I am having the anxiety of hesitation: what if I can never complete it? I wrote a half page yesterday and stopped writing when time was 6 pm. I re-read my two paragraphs several times and edited them more than twice. Polishing a small piece of story is much easier than working on a whole story. As soon as I stopped writing I went home. On the road I tried to keep thinking about the next half page which I will write today. My mind was clear and fresh in terms of the plot and characters. My only concern was time! The same question again and again attacked to my mind. What if I can not complete it and it stays as an incomplete story like many others. There are more than twenty half-stories in my computer. Some of them are almost finished and if I have enough courage to go through them, they will be complete in a few hours. However I can not return them because I lost the enthusiasm which made me start those stories at the beginning. I believe that a short story must be written in a short time. The longer time it takes the more deviant it becomes. The sparkling idea which gave birth to the story can take the whole process if it is hot and fresh. I think I will delete most of my half stories in coming days. Destroying them can help me to stop being obsessed with old ideas. I am not sure how it can help me to star new stories but leaving something behind and not looking at back always inspire new innovations.
Last weekend we went to Mui Ne again. It was nice to stay away from city even though it was only for one day. We took a morning bus and left the city at 9 am. At 1 pm, we were on the beach, walking barefoot. I took Ben Okri’s short story collection with me. It was an easy read and I have finished it without much trouble. I can not say I really enjoyed his style when he mentions dreams and modern magicians. His other book I have read last week was better in terms of style and technique. It was an essay collection and most of the essays were about poets, story telling and the value of art.
In the evening we went to a restaurant near to our resort. There were French people inside so the TV was speaking French all the time. Soon later I noticed that Vietnamese music comes from behind my table. The music was coming from a Vietnamese man’s cell phone and I guess he tries to impress his girlfriend with either the music or the quality of his phone. It was irritating because the sound was loud and he never stopped it. For more than 30 minutes we have listened to a mechanical sound which is definitely not as beautiful as the sound comes from a stereo. When they left the restaurant, he put his telephone into his bottom pocket and the music was still on. I told J that his bottom sings… We both laughed but still tried not to make it too visible for our music-lover friends J
Whenever we inserted the key holder to the socket of electricity on the wall, the TV in the room automatically turned on. And more surprisingly, whatever the channel we watch, there was a red word at the top of the screen: FACTORY. We both did not understand why TV screen always shows the word FACTORY with big, bold and red letters. It must be some kind of error from the settings of the TV. Unlike the first time, our room was away from the sea this time. There was no way to listen to the voice of the sea while trying to sleep. However, I woke up in the next morning with the noise of the construction. There was an ongoing construction beside our resort and we had he nearest room to the area. I could not sleep in the room so I took my book and went to the beach.
After reading two books from Okri I returned to the biography of Kafka. I don’t want to finish it easily because it is, like Kafka’s own books, a heavy read. There are so many words whose meanings I can not figure out from the context. I use a dictionary to keep going. Today I read 6th chapter in the book and I realized that Kafka also suffered a lot from “not being able to write”. This is a quote from his best friend, Brod’s diary. He writes this paragraph after convincing Kafka to describe the events they have seen during a festival. According to the plan, they will both write about the same thing and then they will compare with each other:
I was pursuing a secret plan. Kafka’s literary art was lying fallow at that time: for months he’d completed nothing and he often complained to me that his talent is obviously leaking away, that he’d totally lost it. He was living for months on end in a kind of lethargy, very depressed; in my diaries I find recurrent entries about his melancholy. Le coeur triste, l’esprit gai… Even when he was in his deepest depressions, the effect he had on other people was stimulating, not depressing, except in moments of closest intimacy.
After a break of nine days, I am back to writing again. After the last entry to the blog, I only write a letter to C and a half page beginning for a new short story. Yesterday evening I stopped working at 4 pm and started to work on writing in Turkish for almost two hours. I realized that this is the only way I can keep writing since it is almost impossible to write at home. J wants to talk with me once I return home and this is the only right thing I can do. I can not blame her for feeling lonely or loving me. Actually, I must be thankful to her for being so patient with me.
Whenever I start writing a new short story I am having the anxiety of hesitation: what if I can never complete it? I wrote a half page yesterday and stopped writing when time was 6 pm. I re-read my two paragraphs several times and edited them more than twice. Polishing a small piece of story is much easier than working on a whole story. As soon as I stopped writing I went home. On the road I tried to keep thinking about the next half page which I will write today. My mind was clear and fresh in terms of the plot and characters. My only concern was time! The same question again and again attacked to my mind. What if I can not complete it and it stays as an incomplete story like many others. There are more than twenty half-stories in my computer. Some of them are almost finished and if I have enough courage to go through them, they will be complete in a few hours. However I can not return them because I lost the enthusiasm which made me start those stories at the beginning. I believe that a short story must be written in a short time. The longer time it takes the more deviant it becomes. The sparkling idea which gave birth to the story can take the whole process if it is hot and fresh. I think I will delete most of my half stories in coming days. Destroying them can help me to stop being obsessed with old ideas. I am not sure how it can help me to star new stories but leaving something behind and not looking at back always inspire new innovations.
Last weekend we went to Mui Ne again. It was nice to stay away from city even though it was only for one day. We took a morning bus and left the city at 9 am. At 1 pm, we were on the beach, walking barefoot. I took Ben Okri’s short story collection with me. It was an easy read and I have finished it without much trouble. I can not say I really enjoyed his style when he mentions dreams and modern magicians. His other book I have read last week was better in terms of style and technique. It was an essay collection and most of the essays were about poets, story telling and the value of art.
In the evening we went to a restaurant near to our resort. There were French people inside so the TV was speaking French all the time. Soon later I noticed that Vietnamese music comes from behind my table. The music was coming from a Vietnamese man’s cell phone and I guess he tries to impress his girlfriend with either the music or the quality of his phone. It was irritating because the sound was loud and he never stopped it. For more than 30 minutes we have listened to a mechanical sound which is definitely not as beautiful as the sound comes from a stereo. When they left the restaurant, he put his telephone into his bottom pocket and the music was still on. I told J that his bottom sings… We both laughed but still tried not to make it too visible for our music-lover friends J
Whenever we inserted the key holder to the socket of electricity on the wall, the TV in the room automatically turned on. And more surprisingly, whatever the channel we watch, there was a red word at the top of the screen: FACTORY. We both did not understand why TV screen always shows the word FACTORY with big, bold and red letters. It must be some kind of error from the settings of the TV. Unlike the first time, our room was away from the sea this time. There was no way to listen to the voice of the sea while trying to sleep. However, I woke up in the next morning with the noise of the construction. There was an ongoing construction beside our resort and we had he nearest room to the area. I could not sleep in the room so I took my book and went to the beach.
After reading two books from Okri I returned to the biography of Kafka. I don’t want to finish it easily because it is, like Kafka’s own books, a heavy read. There are so many words whose meanings I can not figure out from the context. I use a dictionary to keep going. Today I read 6th chapter in the book and I realized that Kafka also suffered a lot from “not being able to write”. This is a quote from his best friend, Brod’s diary. He writes this paragraph after convincing Kafka to describe the events they have seen during a festival. According to the plan, they will both write about the same thing and then they will compare with each other:
I was pursuing a secret plan. Kafka’s literary art was lying fallow at that time: for months he’d completed nothing and he often complained to me that his talent is obviously leaking away, that he’d totally lost it. He was living for months on end in a kind of lethargy, very depressed; in my diaries I find recurrent entries about his melancholy. Le coeur triste, l’esprit gai… Even when he was in his deepest depressions, the effect he had on other people was stimulating, not depressing, except in moments of closest intimacy.
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