Ways to write

Sometimes I get tired of inventing stories. You know, one has to make up everything in a story of fiction: the characters, their habits, their ways of thinking, and the events they happen to run into in that particular story. You have to even invent their names (and that is why my characters seldom have names in my stories –I can’t find a suitable name,,,)

I could of course use real events from real life, but that is a little boring; people don’t tend to act like characters of fiction –they act more absurd in real life.

Because of my weariness of using my imagination, I sometime get kicks out of writing stories people want me to write to. They give me ideas (like “could you write about a woman who can’t have a child” or “why don’t you ever write about a woman who beats up her husband” or “I would like to read a story about paedophilia, could you come up with something”) and I’ll write.

Someone could consider writing like that restricted and too controlled (hey, where is the freedom of the writer!); I just find it easy because I used to write by order for years. The chief editor of the magazine I used to write to for many, many years ago, gave me a list of titles she wanted me to write of and so I did. During those years, I learned to write about everything possible and what’s more important: about all the impossible.
Moreover, what’s funny, I didn’t find it difficult at all. It was, on the contrary, very liberating not to have to have a serious statement of your own. You know, very many people expect writers to have something serious to say!

A given item leaves me enough space to express myself and I know where the limits are –writing “on my own” sometimes leads me to areas from where I cannot find back and it’s frustrating. To feel yourself utterly lost and not able to tie all the ends of the ropes. Disaster!

Maybe it’s laziness, maybe it’s a lack of an imaginative mind, a shortage of creative ideas? Maybe it’s that I don’t feel writing is a sombre thing to do and I don’t have to take myself or writing so seriously?
Don’t know. Don't actually care.

Well, I started to think these things while writing a story. In my Finnish blog of fiction, I asked the readers to give me sentences to start stories with. I got plenty of sentences and it has been fun to write these stories. Now I’ve soon used all the given sentences and I think I must ask for new words that’ll end a story. It’s going to be interesting and it helps me to rest my mind while not having to invent stories of my own.