Mina Witteman – author | editor | teacher of creative writing

Gone Writing – Day 4

Posted on January 5, 2016

Writers and artists know that when the muse visits there’s not much you can do but follow her.

Or him.

I know the famous offspring of Zeus and Mnemosyne are women – Calliope, Clio, Euterpe, Terpsichore, Erato, Melpomene, Thalia, Polyhymnia and Urania, for those who like to polish up their knowledge of Greek mythology – but my muse is a man. Not sure how that happened but it might be the reason why I so often write from a male perspective, why my protagonists are mostly men or boys.

Male or female, when the call of the muse comes the writer has no other option than to obey. Or fail his project.

 

Last night my muse’s call came at 3:00 am (or maybe it was jet lag calling, or the story tout court, the jury’s still out on that one). Not the best timing and when at home I usually ignore such untimely calls – it’s a delicate balance keeping both your muse and your beloved Maecenas appeased and at home the muse is the one who usually bites the dust.

But here I answer the call. Wholeheartedly. I have my notebook and pen ready on the nightstand and all I have to do is switch on the light and write.

 

It was worth every minute. My muse fed me amazing stuff. I scribbled page after page full of notes and ideas, some of which I will incorporate in the manuscript today.

 

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My current project’s notebook

Categories: A Bit of Everything

Gone Writing – Day 3

Posted on January 4, 2016

Yesterday, I wrote so many words and so fast my keyboard almost caught fire. My brain shot an unstoppable flow of words down my nerves to my fingers and ordered them to pound away. And while I was pounding away, I thought about how that works, inside my brain? How does my brain tell my fingers what to do, which key to tap, which word to form, what scene to narrate?

 

Readers often tell me that my writing is very visual. Very sensory too. In almost all reviews of my Dutch middle grade adventure Boreas and the Seven Seas, for instance, critics touch upon the fact that the narrative provokes the feeling that the wind actually blows through the reader’s hair, that the reader can almost literally feel the boat rock on the waves. One critic even warns readers for seasickness.

In an earlier book review of Dutch middle grade adventure The Sun Spirit, the critic wrote that it’s as if the reader walks side by side with the protagonist through a scorching desert.

 

If readers perceive my work as visual and sense-experiences, surely I must see those images in my brain first, as if the story is played inside my head like a film, before I write them down.

I am very visual and sense oriented. I draw and paint. I sculpt in clay. And yet, I don’t ‘see’ a story in my head. I don’t ‘see’ the pictures, the film. I hear words, like an inner voice talking to me, telling me what to write. A linguistic and not a visual narrative. As soon as whatever it is inside my head that tells me the story, narrated scene by scene, I dig into my memory and draw on personal experiences to add visual and sensory details, to add emotion.

I don’t perceive those processes – the narration and the digging up of memories – as two separate actions. It’s an amalgamated process, a synthesis, like two subterranean sources forming and feeding one river.

 

Does that make sense? It might not. I don’t know.

 

Anyway, Scrivener told me I wrote 5,635 words before the river dried up yesterday, twice the session target I had set myself. All I know is that I wrote six scenes and that whatever amalgamates all this into a story accessed some of my darkest memories to pull up the visual and sensory details to add to those scenes.

As I slide into the booth – it almost feels like my booth – at Café Francisco, I’m curious as to what the river will bring me today.

 

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Categories: A Bit of Everything

Gone Writing – Day 2

Posted on January 3, 2016

In the previous post I laid out my plans to sound out cafés to write in San Francisco, but yesterday’s find was such a brilliant one – one that brought me a scrumptious breakfast bagel, a delicious salad for lunch, a gallon of tea, and six hours of solid writing – that my muse ordered me to stay put. And what kind of writer would I be if I challenged my muse?

Right.

So I stay put and find myself again at the Café Francisco on the second day of my writing journey. It’s morning still but I have already written 1,400 words. Good words. Great words. Some might fall in the revision battle, a lot might fall in the revision battle, but for now they feel good. The story flows.

 

Why?

I mused over that too after reaching my target yesterday. I not only wondered what spurred me on to write for six hours – other than my muse of course – but also if the writing was different from what I would’ve jotted down had I stayed home. Does my story take another direction now I’ve forced myself outside my comfort zone? I remembered Knausgård asking himself the same question in the first book of his My Struggle cycle:

“To sit there and write a novel and see how the surroundings slowly and imperceptibly shaped the writing, for the way we think is of course as closely associated with the specific surroundings of which we form part as the people with whom we speak and the books we read. Japan, but also Argentina, where familiar European features were lent quite a different hue, shifted to quite a different place, and the USA, one of the small towns in Main, for example, with landscape so like Norway’s southern coast, what might have sprung off the page there?

From: My Struggle – Book One, Karl Ove Knausgård

 

I do think my writing is different here. I know for a fact that my story has taken a different direction, a different shape even. My characters, and my protagonist in particular, behave differently than they would’ve if I had devised them at my desk back home. But also on a word level being here changes the writing. The atmosphere, the talking around me, the views, the unfamiliarity as a whole provoke dialogues, descriptions, symbols, metaphors, similes that would never have popped up had I been in Amsterdam, where everything is comme d’habitude.

Is that a good thing?

Yes. It is. Being in San Francisco shakes up my thinking and opens my senses in a new way. It pushes me beyond my limits. It excites and inspires and makes me greedy. Greedy for more words, more writing. For more stories. Greedy for more time to write.

 

Oh, and even the familiar here turns out to be unfamiliar: Parmesan & Gouda, the best of two cheeses together in one cheese. A product of Holland… Seriously?

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Categories: A Bit of Everything, Books, YA books

Gone Writing – Day 1

Posted on January 2, 2016

Day 1 on of my writing adventure in San Francisco. Or, if I would be honest, day 2. But I’m a writer and I tend to fictionalize everything, including my life. Right? So we skip January 1 – also because what more can you say about the first day of the year when you spend it in a plane? – and jump to January 2: Day 1.

 

I’m sounding out cafés to write. This is my first one. Café Francisco on the corner of Powell and Francisco. I’m sitting in a booth, hidden from the patrons by the coffee machine, and flanked by five young adults chatting away in the booth next to me; three quiet-ish boys and two chatty girls. ‘I know your face,’ one says. ‘I’m not taking your bullshit.’ Could be a great line to start a story with, but I’m not listening too intently to what they’re saying. I’m watching their interaction, how they sit and move, how they react to each other and to their friends’ words, how their brows crease deep when they show – feign? – interest in the opinions expressively expressed.

 

On my way to the café I passed a couple of homeless people, tucked away under a blanket, close together but each of them in his or her own universe of – seemingly – nothingness.

 

The chatter of the five, the soft whispers of a couple sitting further away, the whirring of the coffee machine, the laughter of a group of co-workers in a corner, they spark words and images.

 

And the waiter… the waiter is just the guy I needed for my story. My protagonist’s wake-up call.

 

So, even if the day just started, I can tell you it going to be a good day for writing and stories.

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Café Francisco

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Corner of Powell and Francisco

Categories: A Bit of Everything

Happy 2016!

Posted on December 31, 2015

Wishing all my friends and fans a splendid 2016 filled with love and happiness. Stay true to yourself and to your art. Reach for the stars and reach for what is hidden inside yourself. Keep wandering and explore life beyond your limits. Be gentle. To your heart. To your soul. And to the world.

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(pages from different logbooks by the artist Viktor IV (Walter Karl Glück)

Categories: A Bit of Everything

Author’s Anniversary

Posted on December 16, 2015

With all the writing and organizing I did this year, I completely missed the fact that I have been an author for 10 years this year. My debut came out in 2005. De wraak van Deedee (Deedee’s Revenge) is the story of 10-year-old Deedee and her mean, heartless, blowing-up-frogs brother Matthias, who locks her in a sewage pipe on a military assault course.

Deedee can’t tell her parents what her brother did without being punished herself for being on the strictly off limits military fields. Her revenge comes later and is sweet. Or not?

Origineel Deedee

The gorgeous cover illustration by amazing illustrator and artist Philip Hopman

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My son Olivier and me at the military assault course near where I grew up

Categories: A Bit of Everything

My Muse

Posted on December 12, 2015

When my muse rests
his head and leaves me for the day
oblivious
of what he instilled
oblivious 
of the flow that ramps up inside
of words and scenes that burn their way into
my story
my fingers fly
to a rhythm that sends my brain into
a trance
away from the world
sequestered to those who can’t read my mind
liberated to those who can
When my muse rests
his head and leaves me for the day
my fire blazes

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Categories: A Bit of Everything