Reading Kafka and Writing Fiction

This month at #bookclub organised on @thewritersblock we decided to read short stories by Franz Kafka. Kafka is an author that has always been dear to me, having visited a museum about his life when I was in Prague. Yet I never read a lot of his books, although what I read of his was always very interesting and kept me occupied for days after I finished reading it.

I decided to read some of his short stories. Many of them can be found online, and I went and read quite a couple of them in the original German (which can be found here). (For English version, this pdf is very nice). Reading someone in their original language is valuable beyond measure, I think. Especially for someone like Kafka, who spent a LOT of time on his stories, often reworking them for years.

But as I read on, and read some reviews & articles about certain stories, I realised I was reading only a very small part of what he was saying. So much was going on that I couldn’t get. It left me dazzling, and really made me doubt about my own ability as a writer of fiction… would I ever be able to give my stories so much depth and meaning?

Story ‘Being Unhappy’

In the end I went for a very short story, called ‘Unglucklichsein’ (here in English translation) which was a story that spoke to me from the first words. But why did I like it, I wondered? Perhaps because it is similar to the kind of stories I like to write… In which nothing really happens, but the smallest things make a difference. It is much more a story about someone’s character and how he deals with deep feelings, instead of a story filled with action and decisions. Somehow I’m more and more attracted by stories like that.

Another thing I liked was the twist. Not one with confetti and trumpets, but subtle and one that leaves you want to read that whole story again, wondering how you could have missed this! The twist however was a nice addition, it wasn’t something the story needed per se to be a good story. Which to me shows that this story was a good combination of strengths: both using character building to keep the reader into reading, and a good plot to hook you.

Writing

Part of #bookclub at @thewritersblock is writing about what you read… This time I decided to not write a non-fiction piece, but try my hand on fiction based on something I was inspired to by reading Kafka. So I did. It took me a long time to figure out what to write, but I used the story as a prompt, you could say.

And I ended up really happy with the result. I based my story on my own experiences while living in Shanghai, something which I have strong feeling towards, but which I have not yet written about before. So it was a nice experience discovering I could write about that time and those experiences.

But I liked the story so much, that I will keep working on it more and then try to publish it somewhere mainstream. Steem is great, but things you work on a lot deserve a place where their worth is recognised better or maybe differently. Trying to venture out in new domains, scary, but also worth to try.

I hope.

^{Here an overview of more fiction/short stories and poetry by @nobyeni.}