For many years, since I have started to fall in love with stories and with the idea that our lives are unwritten books, I have dreamt of writing the book of my life. And let’s be honest, it’s a feasible thing, an easy dream to make true. Literally, all it takes is a pen and a piece of paper, or a word processor and a keyboard.
Okay — it’s not all it takes.
You need content, and possibly a bit of talent. You need planning, an eagerness for fictionalisation, time, something to say. But what I mean is that the aforementioned pen or keyboard is all it takes to get started, literally put down your first word.
THE TWENTIES
So now picture this: I’m almost entering my 20s and, although I have a keyboard and a perfectly functioning Amiga 500, I tell myself that I don’t have a word processor, a dedicated program I can use for the purpose. I could make music with my Amiga, I could paint with a mouse and, of course, I could play amazing video games (Aaah… Monkey Island, Turrican III, Another World…). But for its most basic function, writing, it was better for me to think my computer was useless. This way, I could finally commiserate with myself and shout to the world I wasn’t as lucky as some of my friends who had a PC.
Of course, the handwriting was only for diaries and sparse thoughts. Not even remotely possible to conceive writing a book without seeing the structure of the book slowly forming in front of my eyes, with all the margins set and the indent of the first line and maybe the first letter of the chapter a big and curly drop cap in some gothic fancy and the rule of 60 characters by 30 lines per page and the inspiring Courier font letters appearing one after another on the blank page… ahem — screen.
Impossible.
So, what a pity that world literature could miss out on a promising writer just for lack of such a basic tool!
Then something unexpected happened, a deus ex machina. A close friend of mine had an old electric typewriter, and he was keen to lend it to me. I was very excited, I must admit. But after a few days, I realised that that was not the solution to fulfil my ambitions as a writer, either. Typing for the first time on a typewriter meant, inevitably, a lot of mistakes and plenty of mistyping and corrections on the page. So ugly! Not exactly the clean, beautiful, edited page that was supposed to be of inspiration and encouragement for further writing. You see, the idea of the existence of a draft, before the immaculate perfection of the final product was, again, inconceivable. All this led naturally to slow progressively the process until it basically came soon to a stop.
THE THIRTIES
Fast forward a few years…
To be fair, between 23 and 29, I was actually writing more. Maybe it was because I finally had a PC. (Although it wasn’t a MacBook Pro — prohibitive cost. And lucky the ones who could write in a café or by the beach on the other side of the world. There was no comparison between that and writing in my small room at my mother’s place). Or maybe it was because I had discovered the beauty of a Moleskine, of which I would fill no more than three pages every year, before buying a new one. Or maybe it was that writing thoughts on any piece of paper, even toilet paper, could be considered bohèmien and romantic.
And so I was writing, but mainly because I had a reason to do it: a monthly public reading of poetry and short stories (where I would be beautifully drunk and alive most of the time) that I was hosting together with an amazing group of creatives, actors, singers. I had a motive, you see. Still, that couldn’t be good enough to sit down and structure properly a novel. I hadn’t lost the obsession, the constant thought of it, though. While during the end of my twenties I was on a sort of waiting mode so that I could collect the necessary experiences that would allow me to make my story extraordinary, in the thirties the excuses to not write got to a whole different level.
First, I now wanted it to be a massive work. An opus magnum, like Balzac’s La Comedie Humaine, or the cycle of Émile Zola. A ginormous fictionalisation of my whole life in fieri, while it was happening. A story made of dozens of books. And to do that, I needed a structure: where a book would start and where it would end?
Second: would have been wise to develop the story chronologically? Where would be the beginning? Was it so interesting to start with the first 15 years of life? Wouldn’t it be better to give away parts of the past during later years’ accounts? Maybe the ideal beginning could have been the first kiss. Maybe the driving factor in determining the content of each book could have been the most important relationships of my life. Maybe women. Anyway, this was a very important point (a perfect excuse), and it would have been difficult to even start writing before having it all planned.
But most importantly, third: I had to decide if I wanted to write in the first or third person. How much I wanted to play with fiction and reality, blurred memories and unfulfilled hopes? And this is something, to this day, I haven’t decided yet. It’s truly the perfect excuse that will allow me to never write the book of my life.
THE FORTIES
Now, once in the 40s (the ideal time to write a book), did I finally manage to write my story? Well, no, I am not writing the book of my life. And although one mustn’t forget the ‘never say never’, I don’t think I ever will. And it’s fine. If this everlasting twenty-year-long dreaming taught something is that it’s way too easy to hide behind the mask of wanting to be perfect and, possibly, the best, just to not confront your own laziness or, worse, your fears. What fears? Well, let me try the obvious metaphor: the plunge.
(But to do that, you need to imagine you really can scare yourself with anything.)
You’re on a springboard, very high above the pool, and you can’t jump. Why you can’t? It’s an irrational fear. Nothing bad can really happen. For sure, you won’t die. Maybe it’s about the performance. What if you dive clumsily and people will laugh at you? And yet, it goes further. Sometimes, even when you are not on a springboard, just standing on the edge of the pool, it will take you hours to enter the pool. The sun is so warm and the water seems to be so cold. It’s so cosy and sweet here, out of the water. Even with no people around, you need to find an excuse, anything that can lead to the fear of being judged. What if the water is too cold, and they will have to save you, and you will feel so stupid, and you will have to accept all the judgements of your weaknesses?
All this is, of course, a paranoid exaggeration of a situation. But I use it just to show you how easily our mind can conjure the conditions for any kind of excuses if we need them (and in our eyes, as crazy as they can be, they will always look perfect anyway). This is even truer for a creative mind, I reckon. So the crazier I sound, the more I feel happy that my fantasies are still pretty alive and kicking.
And finally, here we are. I’ve been among the first to “discover” Medium when it was launched, and it’s been love at first sight. The immediate instinct was to write something for this beautiful, minimal, clean platform. I now have a MacBook, I can write in cafés! (well, I will, as soon as Covid will allow it again.) I don’t need a word processor. I have Medium. The look of it is graceful: the elegant font, the margins, the alignment — there’s even a word count, damn it! There’s literally nothing that can stop you, Bob. Except for… maybe, only… Medium is still not a good place for non-English writers: shall I write in English or Italian?
Oh, c’mon. Here we go again!
“Well, Bob, after almost ten years, you didn’t write in either. So make a little effort and take the plunge. Try and break the loop.”
“Okay… I’ll try. I will.”
And I did.
