Writing hasn’t been easy lately.

That’s not to say I haven’t been able to jot things down. And neither am I “out of ideas” or bereft of the required energy or confidence to keep on ploughing through the sentences and drafts.

It’s just that my current project is at a point where the drafts, the ideas and the characters need some time to get to know each other better. They’re talking at cross-purposes and on a vague, sun-bleached plan, which was mapped out by a remote authority seated in a comfy office and simply left out to the elements and the drafts, the ideas and the characters are forced to squint to make out the shapes which were once words or diagrams meant to take them to the next stage of their journey.

This probably just means that I need to take a break.

Which is funny to consider, when my writing schedule is essentially “whatever you manage in the one hour before you have to head out to go to work”. But a mental break from a specific strand from writing doesn’t necessarily mean stopping to write altogether. Even switching projects works, though arguably swapping over an ingrained, long-term writing practice for some experimental noodling could have an even greater restive (or restorative) effect.

***

Freedom in writing is always a relative term, for me… I’m deeply sceptical of the idea that an artistic practice implies a sense of spontaneous, intuitive and even anarchic liberation away from the strictures of mainstream society. If anything, I find that it actually requires a deeper and more neurotic commitment to some of these tenets, with the anarchism only made evident in the obsessive streak with which you double-down on them.

You can zone out at work, and go for the umpteenth cigarette or coffee. Household chores have definitive parameters, and even the most byzantine of bureaucratic tasks have some kind of ceiling. Clients will have deadlines, and even lovers have their ultimatums. Lovers, partners and friends also have physical bodies that tick away to sometimes endless-seeming, but ultimately finite desires and frustrations. They may be erratic but they’re never truly, entirely unpredictable for those of us who know a thing or two about how humans operate in general. And while they may expect a certain degree of telepathy on your end — and as annoying as such an expectation may be — they will never ask you to create and recreate them anew.

But your characters will. And this is why I think that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will always remain a reference point. I’m sure there’s a flurry of doctoral theses and obscure articles out there to prove the following statement wrong, but I’m always surprised that so much of our processing of that pioneering piece of sci-fi gothic literature is focused on the ‘scientific hubris’ reading, and so little on how it’s also a commentary on the act of creation. Yes, I’m sure the theological implications have often been made as well, but I’m referring specifically to how Victor Frankenstein could also be seen as the neurotic and nervous artist trying to come to terms with the horror of a first draft. (And also, how that first draft threatens to morph into something unexpected, and demands that more of these mutations be facilitated by dint of a fertile co-partner).

(I’m not trying to claim this interpretation as original. Those of you have links and PDFs, please pass them on. They are more than welcome).

So yeah, for me, writing is never about freedom but about finding the right straitjacket for the right moment. Or rather, the correct protective suit for whichever uncharted territory you happen to be traversing at the time. Because the territory will always BE uncharted, and populated by monsters to whom you’d not only have to teach language, but whose independence you’d have to facilitate and reassure. Let Victor Frankenstein’s fate be a cautionary tale.

***

Apart from being literally one of two or three annual events I legitimately look forward to each year, the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival, organised by Inizjamed, often offers me a chance to experience writing in a looser and more immediate way to my default mode. More poetry, less novels. More of experimental prose, and less of the three-act structure.

It often results in me buzzing with a renewed fervour for the written word, experiencing precisely the kind of ‘break-that-is-not-a-break’ that I’d mentioned earlier. You encounter new writers without the aid of an algorithm: better still, right in the flesh. This adds wrinkles to your programme; unexpected experiences that open new doorways.

But there was a dash of welcome familiarity in this year’s edition of the festival. As an honorary member of the extender Inizjamed family, I’d assumed that I had some dibs on suggesting future festival guests. So a couple of years ago I started lobbying for the inclusion of Karin Tidbeck to the roster. Of course, as a subculture-rat since my early teens, my allegiance to specific groups will always trump pretty much all else: in this case, it’s the genre/speculative fiction community. I will always aim to advocate and represent of that literary class in my local stomping grounds, much in the same way I managed to do for Kali Wallace and Jon Courtenay Grimwood.

But I also felt Karin to be germane to Inizjamed’s festival in particular for more specific reasons related to their artistic practice and MO. A festival that comes with its own translation workshop attached, a multi-lingual, self-translating author is practically catnip. And a writer who so keenly identifies with liminal spaces can’t help but feel at home in any festival that deigns to include ‘Mediterranean’ in its title, and this particular one does so with a degree of conviction: operating with both intellectual rigour and humane generosity to create authentic spaces of encounter.

***

All of this largely a preamble to celebrate this year’s edition of the festival (as I did when I was lucky enough to participate back in 2018); to remind you that I got a chance to chat with Karin in print about their uncategorisable nature in the run up to the event; to brag about being allowed to ventriloquise for Karin in her absence from the grand finale due to a ridiculously early wake-up call the following morning; and to hopefully open this space back up for more regular, and looser, writings of this kind.

Especially now that I’m starting a new job in a field that’s relevant to my experience once again. Which is the perfect push and pull of the familiar and the new.

***

I mentioned the prolific (and gentlemanly) Jon Courtenay Grimwood above. During one of our in-person conversations (either during his Malta visit or a follow-up meeting in London, I can’t recall), I spoke admiringly of his substantial output, a lot of it filtered through different noms de plume.

He responded by stating simply, “Well, if I don’t write, I can’t think.”

Increasingly, I find this to be true in my case. It doesn’t necessarily mean that whatever I write will have any value at all; at least not in that early stage. And neither does it have to be some sort of revelatory, epiphanic distillation of the self at that given moment.

The mechanics of writing are their own reward. This is why every single shift away from the programme has value. Words remain words. They will serve you in different ways at different times, but they remain at your disposal.

Featured image: Authors performing at the final night of the 18th edition of the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival, on 26 August 2023. From left: Tanja Bakic, Claudia Gauci, Karin Tidbeck, Simone Inguanez and Virginia Monteforte (photographer)