I am often asked where a book begins. With an idea? With a character? With the first sentence? I always answer the same way: with silence. A long, sometimes uncomfortable silence in which there is nothing yet.
At first nothing happens
For the first months I do not write. I walk, I look, I listen to strangers talking in cafés. I jot down fragments in a notebook: someone's gesture, the smell of a stairwell, a phrase that was not said to me. This is not yet a book. It is not even the idea of one. It is simply attention.
Then a person appears. Not a plot, but a person. I see him standing by a window and understand that he is waiting for something. I do not yet know what. But from that moment I can no longer leave him.
The hardest thing in this time is not to hurry. I want to sit down and write the first chapter, to prove to myself that the book exists. But it is not ready yet, and I can feel it.
Doubt as part of the work
Then the writing begins, and with it the doubt. I rewrite the first pages dozens of times. I delete chapters that seemed the best. Sometimes it feels that it is all in vain, that the story is not coming together and never will.
A book is not what I invented. It is what remained after I took away everything unnecessary.
I have learned not to trust these thoughts, but not to argue with them either. They come and go, like weather. The work stays.
When a book is finished, I do not feel joy. Rather a quiet relief and a little sadness. The man by the window has finally seen his waiting end. And I return once more to the silence where there is nothing yet.
