I started working on a novel back in late 2016. The novel is about an ordinary guy Johnny who is working as a salesman at a furniture store. He’s young and broke and trying to become somebody in this life. He meets a girl who comes to the store and they go out on a date and he falls in love with her. The problem is that they both are coming from different worlds and they are very different and incompatible people. The middle of the story is being written and the ending is in progress. There has to be a sad ending, I think. Maybe even a tragic one who knows?
There are a few other projects that I have in the works. Yeh, a few other novel ideas and a TV show are on my long-term writing list. I know that I will eventually get there but all I need is the time and a proper state of my mind. The timing thing is always the problem. There could be a lot of time but no passion for any writing or my mind would be in some weird place. Sometimes life gets in a way and there is no chance to write anything, sometimes I’d try to squeeze a thirty-minute to an hour to sit down and write something. That’s pretty much all you need as a writer. Just sit the fuck down and write.
I love to write early in the morning. I do find early morning hours the best to write because there is nothing else to do and likely nobody will bother you. A lot of times, I open my laptop and start writing just about anything. It could be the most random writing ever. I rarely know what will come up once the words start filling the page. Then one page fills up there might be two pages and three and so on. Writing is not about the pages. It is about mastership of releasing your thoughts and emotions on the page making the reader live your writing, feel your writing and want to read more. Writing is like a therapy for a writer. When you are all alone, processing your thoughts, building your ideas as they come to you one after another and transforming them into sentences, the magic happens. Eventually, you’ll get something out of your system and you’ll feel great about yourself afterward, even if your writing wasn’t that good. There is also a sense of accomplishment that will give you a lot of energy and will for sure lift your writing sprits up.
I was never an early riser for most of my life but also I was a nobody for most of my life. Once I started to think about it more and develop new habits, I’ve started to enjoy the leeway getting up early in the morning. All of a sudden, I had some extra time in the day to do something good for myself. One has to be motivated to stick to the morning routine but once you are there and you see better results and feel better about yourself overall, you’ll stick to it.
To me, it all began with going to the gym early in the mornings before going to work. That meant that I was getting on the health binge and that I started to organize my time better while improving my health. I remember the significant emotional and energy boost after my first five-thirty-am workout. I felt like a brand-new person. I felt like I can do anything. I was living my life fully again or maybe for the first time. With my morning workout routine came another habit which I have shamelessly abandoned, reading books. With reading more books and discovering various writers I’ve got the writing bug and I started to think a lot about writing. And there it all began.
At some point, I came across Charles Bukowski. Good, crazy old man Bukowski. Bukowski was an American writer and that he wrote some crazy stories using foul language a lot. I was always a fan of explicit content and Bukowski was a perfect fit for me. I’ve bought an audiobook “Women” first which I loved. That audiobook had the best narration ever by Christian Baskous and the story itself was funny and so real and so interesting that I couldn’t get enough of it. Eventually, I bought all the Bukowski audiobooks and listen to all of them multiple times. I found bukowski.net and there it was the goldmine. This website has the entire database of all Bukowski’s original manuscripts, interviews, photos, screenshots of his original typed material, timelines, any fucking thing a real Bukowski fan needs to read and check out. It was just great. I remember sitting in my room in the evenings and reading those poems thinking, damn is this it? This is “poetry”? This is so simple even I can do it. And I did. In early April of 2016, I wrote my first poem after being heavily inspired by Charles Bukowski’s poetry. Bukowski inspired the hell out of me and when I sat down to write my stuff I’ve heard Bukowski’s voice in my head as I was typing it away.
I wasn’t writing a lot in the beginning. I don’t even seem to write a lot now. I always felt like I need more time to manage my thoughts. I needed more privacy, more ideas, more something… In the meantime, I would be inspired as hell but writing very little or nothing at all. After discovering and getting into Charles Bukowski’s writing, I started to feel something inside of me. That kind of feeling I’ve never experienced before. It felt like there was a fire burning deep inside. I can’t explain it but it changed who I was overnight. It was the new beginning of everything for me. I’ve changed from being constantly lost and frustrated asshole to somebody who had a purpose in life. I wanted to be a writer ever since.
Charles Bukowski’s writing is mostly autobiographical poems and stories and novels. You don’t have to be an expert on Bukowski to figure out that everything that he ever wrote about he saw and experienced in his personal life. He used simple language, plain prose with no fancy words, easy-reading writing, quick juicy sentences, simple dialogues, short paragraphs and that was so inspiring and appealing to almost anybody. There are no questions that his writing inspired a shit ton of many other writers. Writers who are not afraid of being a writer, writing honestly about their lives and using strong language while being funny and real. To someone like myself who sucked at writing and English was not the first language, Bukowski was a writer that gave me hope and helped me to take a chance at becoming a writer. I knew I could write and that I have a strong writing voice and I could over time build my writing style. I can use simple English and put it all down on the page as simple as Bukowski did and get my stories out there to the world.
I am reading more than I ever did in my entire life. My favorite writers who inspired me the most were Edgar Allan Poe, Sit Arthur Connan Doyle, Ernest Hemingway, John Fante and of course the one and only Charles Bukowski. Discovering different writers and reading a lot of fiction helped me getting my ideas in place. I remember waking up in the middle of the night with a dream that I felt like it could be a good writing idea. A lot of stories came to me that way. I started to pay more attention to the world around me and capture in my memory anything that I thought I might use one day in my writing. I started to think like a writer and I was thinking about writing all the time. There is an urgency to write something every day. I don’t write poetry as much as I used to but I write more prose and more short stories. I work on my blog regularly just to keep in shape and I am always trying to finish that novel I’ve started back in 2016. I hope to finish it soon or maybe sometime this year. The greatest thing is that I was able to rediscover myself and find what I enjoy doing and there is no end to my writing ideas and possibilities.