I wrote all the stories in this section between 2011-14. After all these years I no longer feel happy with the styles, yet it seems worth it to record them somewhere, since people have enjoyed the way I tried to explore different emotions in each piece.
Each story was originally written as just one paragraph. For readability I have split the paragraph into several more only now, several years later.
The idea was to have a short piece that hints at a larger story. Describing emotions or a situation like a snapshot I tried to imply what the main characters were like beyond the constraints of the paragraph. Sometimes there is a clear narrative, other times it’s more expressionist. There are a few allegories. I also experimented with the kind of detached style which is quite popular among authors today, as well as purple prose which is often ridiculed but fun to write.
The stories don’t describe my own life or mentality at the time. While writing I was always trying to inhabit the skin of a character, even if the narration is in first person. I find this aspect of writing difficult to explain. Of course when you write about emotions, you must have some experience of them. But the more you write, the further away from your real life the text gets, because ordinary life doesn’t have enough variation to make the writing interesting. Even when a story looks more like a blog post, it is still fiction. There are a couple of exceptions, when the mood of a story has clearly been affected by something in my life. I’ll point out those exceptions when I get there.