Sombre Reflections
You are reading something from my archive. I probably no longer stand by it, but decided to keep it around because I found it interesting when I assembled it.
I’m lying in my bed, heart beating like the wind, listening to Yumeji’s Theme, pondering why my writing morphed from playful fantasy to overly sombre ‘literary fiction’ when I transitioned from German to English.
I remain convinced that the English language in itself doesn’t force one to write sombre meditations on the human experience—without ever finishing them—neither do I believe that the mere passing of time is the reason why I left genre fiction behind me in favour of some sort of dreamlike magic realism teetering between magic or realism, never satisfying me. I still wake up, full with excitement for a world of temples, filled with magical symbols, and elves, but I just can’t bring myself to write it, or even to plot out the details of the world. It’s as if I’m trapped in a perpetual cycle of haphazard world building, unable to escape. So I just script world after world, never transcending the outlines, while remaining strangely focussed on how exactly elves’ ears twitch with excitement.
Whenever I wrote in German, I used to devote myself to describing the floor and its intricacies in unnecessary detail, barely able to cram in a few lines of dialogue or plot. Now, I tend to obsess over colours or feelings—or Elven ears. The odd thing is that I haven’t managed to finish writing anything at all. In retrospect it seems beyond unbelievable that my misguided attempts at high fantasy managed to attract any readers at all, yet my epic had almost two thousand. I don’t know why or how, but I’m grateful for each and everyone who decided to gift their attention to me.
Another thing I’ve changed is protagonists—in German, I favoured girls. Now, boys, isolated, weathering a tempestuous storm alone at midnight, dominate; mostly because I’m simply not able to write convincing dialogue. I’m not even sure if I manage to sound convincingly human in person; I like to believe that my old writings sparked with wit and were fun to read; my current efforts all skew to the melodramatic, attempting to ask questions about life itself—I don’t think they succeed, but at least they try.
Whenever I look back, I seek to find out what happened, but I’m not sure.