unusual // At this point, I already knew, that I am not normal. But at exactly this day in January 2019 it was very clearly shown to me: my writing is different too. My text and my approach was completely different, from everybody else in this seminar about writing. I stood out. In their opinion in a bad way. I was criticized. It´s fine, I am used to being misunderstood. But then I realized that they wanted me to write the exact same thing as everyone else in this room. They wanted to me to write about a typical sunny beach with sunshades in pink and yellow, about plastic toys for the kids to play with in the sand and about groups of loud rude men drinking sangria out of a bucket. But that´s not my view of the world. And they didn´t know why I was smiling while being bashed in front of the group. It was my moment. The moment I realized that being different can be my biggest asset. Because therefore my writing is un-usual, un-normal. For once, it could be an advantage to be different … is it?

The task in the writing seminar was to portray a scene at the beach.
These were the first drafts. Raw, sloppy and unusual. You can read the final version here.

raw and sloppy /// The first draft is something I never show to anybody. Just, because it only makes sense to me. It´s embarrassing. It´s raw. Sometimes I can´t even read the notes myself. Wrong grammar. Wrong spelling. Who cares? Words will need to be exchanged, complete phrases are going to be eliminated and facts have to get checked. I mean, I write about a spruce in my first quickly jotted paragraph, but what if the tree I had visualized in my mind was actually more shaped like a fir or a pine? Well it makes a difference in the final text, but during the first draft I need to allow myself to be loose and sloppy. Catching that initial idea is far from perfection. Scribbles are not supposed to be beautifully crafted. Spit out that draft, let it sit, put it into a cupboard, pick it up two years later if the topic is still relevant and is worth to be refined into a final text.

Typing the first raw draft into a file is usually not a step in my writing process. I only did it for this screenshot in order to demonstrate how far the first draft and the final version can be apart, sometimes.