Category: Free Inquiry

Listen to it here:

Anchor is a great recording site. It is also a great idea if you want to edit your text and flow, to listen to yourself reading your story. (Please disregard the title Hot Topics, Hot Takes- that was for a science project. Still figuring Anchor out!)

https://www.thesaurus.com/

Get your synonyms here! Best thing on the internet for a writer.

We’ve all been there. In front of the blank screen, staring back at us daringly. And you wonder, what the hell do people write about? And as soon as you attempt a sentence, that nagging in your head changes to: nothing feels original, everything’s already been written!

At least, that’s how I’ve felt lately. What worked for me was to go back to the basics- remind myself of why I want to write in the first place. I think of all the books whose characters have inhabited my head and heart like old friends, of the songs so beautiful they make you dissolve. I made lists of some literary and musical inspirations, for next time that empty feeling strikes. Perhaps just looking at all the artists and author’s names will refuel me, or it can be remind me to listen or read their work to get that instant inspiration.

BOOKS

The Silent Patient, Alex Michaelides

The Neapolitan Novels (series of 4), Elena Ferrante

An Illustrated Treasury of Swedish Folk and Fairy Tales, John Bauer

The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

Some Things That Stay, Sarah Willis

Belonging, Nora Krug

Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens

Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin

The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante

Maggie Cassidy, Jack Kerouac

Selected Poems of Anne Sexton

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

The Girls, Emma Cline

The Divines, Ellie Eaton

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Blonde, Joyce Carol Oats

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

The Catcher in the Rye, J.D Salinger

Oskyld, Åsa Ericsdotter

Smälter, Åsa Ericsdotter

Kim Novak Badade Aldrig i Genesarets Sjö, Håkan Nesser

Doktor Glas, Hjalmar Söderberg

MUSICIANS

David Bowie

Lana Del Rey

Lou Reed

Iggy Pop

Francoise Hardy

Jacques Brel

Serge Gainsbourg

Dalida

Edith Piaf

Mando Diao

Weyes Blood

Frida Hyvonen

Hakan Hellstrom

Arctic Monkeys

Alex Turner

Leonard Cohen

Rufus Wainwright

Velvet Underground

Ted Gardestad

Thastrom

“The colours are so bright they are burnt to the inside of my eyes…”

Ida leant her temple against the cool window, eyes closed, tasting the words, smiling. Rain hammered against the glass, so steadily it blurred into a smooth humming in her head. 

Maja, loyal and needy as a dog, burrowing her pitched question into Ida’s elsewhereness again. 

“Kalle and Lars are going fishing for pike, they surface when it’s raining, they’re huge.”

Her little cousin, expecting a no, was nervously tapping the threshold with one foot. It wasn’t this or the melodramatic gloss in her brown eyes that made Ida get up- for Maja’s neediness was insatiable- it was rather the thought of perhaps having something worthy to write back to mamma about. 

They walked through the rain, two pastel specks in raincoats, down to where the boys were sitting. 

“We want to fish too”, said Ida.

Kalle glanced over his shoulder, Lars remained static. Something hot welled up in Ida, and she swallowed it back, tasting acid and salt. Her brother’s indifference stung differently when they were around others. 

You can have the bamboo rods”, Kalle offered.

The girls sighed, but accepted this natural order of things. 

“And you can have five worms”, Kalle said, “If you use another dock.”

“What other dock?”

“Find another one, we want the pikes here to ourselves.”

  Maja growled dramatically, and grabbed the extra can of worms from her brother. 

“But if you catch one we share it”, she yelled.

“Sure, sis”, Kalle called back, his words barely detectable, any potential trace of irony washed away in the rain. 

They went into the woods that lined the curved end of the shoreline, wanting to get away from the boys. They turned on a barely-trampled path down to the water. Down a slight slope, birches framed an opening, the lake shining in the shady forest, and a splintered, rotting dock therein. They settled carefully on each side of it, to not tip it over. They tossed their lines as far as they could, only to get them caught in algae. 

“It’s too shallow”, Maja said.

She sighed and changed positions restlessly until she finally gave up. 

“Let’s go to the boys”

How free she seemed; undefined by defeat. Her brother would let her join, and they would both inhabit a still, agreeable silence, until they raced home, rods fencing. 

Ida let Maja go, feeling mighty in her chosen loneliness, alone in the rain on a sinking dock. She wanted to cry, but the scene seemed too perfect to be anything but pathetic. She sunk into her coat and tightened her grip around the bamboo. She wouldn’t move. Not until the giant elder pike, emerged from the folktails, came biting the wriggling, impaled worm, until she’d snapped back its boar-sized head, and its rigour mortis spasms had ceased, and the blood spread on the dock, dripping through the cracks, and its intestines hung out of the kitchen bin, and the butter in the cast iron pan sizzled and steamed up each window, rosing their cheeks, as they toasted to her, washing the white meat down with burning schnapps, and it would be all they ever talked talked about this summer, and this summer would forever become that summer, and she would write to… 

Suddenly, a giant splash tore through the silence. Ida stood up, gripping the rod with both hands. It trembled in her grip, determinedly outstretched. Something surfaced from the ripples made next to the dock. It wasn’t a pike, but a girl. A blonde head bobbing to the rhythm of her breast strokes. When she circled back toward the dock, she suddenly noticed Ida, and started to splash, as if drowning.

“Jävlar” the girl swore. “What are you doing here?”

She started to front crawl for the shore, and when the water reached just beneath her shoulders, she froze. Ida stared. It looked like she was naked. 

“This is MY swimming spot”, the girl yelled. “Move!”

The girl was shivering from the cold, and heaving from anger. She looked crazy. Ida grabbed her rod, hastily wrapping the line around it. She got off the dock, but turned around, and walked towards the girl in the water. She stepped in with her rubber boots. The girl looked defiantly at her.

“What’s taking you so…”

Ida had sunk her hand into the worm can, and made a fist with soil, feeling it wriggle with life. In one swift motion, she threw the dirt in the girl’s face. Then she turned and ran. Tears burned her eyes, from the rushing of her heart. When she reached the big path, she heard something behind her, a sound twisted by the rain. It was her; Cornelia, laughing. 

A traditional Swedish midsummer song (about elves, and a magic forest)

(omg I actually wrote a chapter in prose! It didn’t take a miracle- it did however take being alone in a cabin by the ocean that lost its wifi for 1.5 hours)

Lårö lake, a spectra of green. The sun shaving flakes of gold through the surface, the inexplicable blackness beneath. No contours or outlines around, but the hand, numbed yellow, before her. Eyes wide, it floods you; it becomes you. Only two pirouettes for the green to blur; blur limbs, gravity. Until her aching lungs, as if suddenly inflated, spit her up. 

Above her, the world still miserably intact. Lars on his stomach on the grass, as engrossed in a comic one can be, legs swinging in the air. Ida dreamt of it; her brother running over the dock, a desperate, clumsy dive in, shirt still on. The magnetic side of the blackness beneath her suddenly shifted, from pushing away to pulling her, straight and motionless, into the abyss. Until Lars’ hand finds hers, drags her back up. Perfectly lifeless she’d lay, sprawled in the sun, shiny and pale, creature-like. But her eyes would flutter open, to Lars’ cry, his body collapsing over hers, sorrow and relief heaving through and out of him. She would smile, alive by nothing but love, pure with nothing but a will to live. 

Her sultana fingertips found the dock, and she pulled herself up. She could see their cousins, Maja and Kalle, having joined Lars. The two siblings were each flat on their stomachs, pinching each other. Maja, as always, shrieking- a cry of pain and delight. Kalle was the oldest of them all, older than Lars by two years, the biggest, strongest, and due to this Ida was of course, scared and infatuated. She pretended not to notice them as she went for her towel, wincing at their bashful closeness. Lars seem to pretend to not notice her. She dug in her purse, and took out the letter. Droplets from her hair bled out the ink. The paper wrinkled as if kept and re-read for years. It only arrived yesterday.

“älskling!

You should see the colours of the Marrakech market. They are so bright they are burnt on the inside of my eyes when I go to sleep, and re-appear in my dreams. The air is so thick and wet it feels like a thousand little eels are constantly sucking your skin, leaving you tired and dry. Work is well, we are on the 12th floor of a building, facing the river in the east. I have a cubicle, but at least there is working air condition so I am not complaining. I’m writing a piece on the lack of healthcare for expectant mothers- it’s intriguing and heartbreaking all at once!”

“Can I see?”

Maja blocked the sun, and goosebumps bit every inch of Ida’s skin. 

“It’s from mamma”, Ida said.

Maja sat down next to her, resting her head against her shoulders. Ida started to read. 

“Come on”, Lars moaned, slapping his comic shut. “Not again. I’ve heard this three times today already.”

Heart in throat, Ida was about to respond, when Kalle interrupted.

“Last one in is a…”

He started sprinting and the rest leapt after him. That was Kalle’s godly ability; to own and steer any moment his way. 

Back in the water, even with splashing and laughter around her, Ida wished again for it to reset her, bleed out her proportions, her perspectives. She fought a sudden urge to drag Lars down, wrestle him, tumble through the water, smear out time, find themselves in stillness, back as little kids, find each other again, find mamma coming home and this summer no longer being be so nakedly, burningly bright.

I have a lot of ideas for my story, and many things are falling into place. I have the dramatic climax down, the structure for jumping back and forth in time, and of course, a plot twist. However, there is one important aspect I am awfully stuck with. I want the story to be centralised on two friends, and I have the traits of my main character down, but her best friend… I can’t seem to fully capture her; her essence. Who are you, what do you want with your life? Do I flesh you out through text as I go; sketch you with letters? Or will your contours and details simply emerge out of the dark room when ready?