De tekst die zichzelf schrijft

Karl Ove Knausgård (in de reeks “By Heart” door Joe Fassler op The Atlantic). Hij schreef o.a. de zesdelige Mijn strijd-reeks:

Every morning now, I write one page. I get up early and write one page in two hours. I start with a word. It could be “apple” or “sun” or “tooth”, anything – it doesn’t matter. It’s just a starting point – a word, an association – and the restriction that I write about it. It can’t be about anything else. Then I just start, without knowing what it’s going to be about. And it’s like the text produces itself.

I’m not talking about quality. For god’s sake, no. It’s not like this text ever looks good or anything. I’m just sitting there writing. Not thinking, and writing.

When you are not aware of yourself, you start to write things you have never thought about before. Your thoughts do not take the path they would normally have followed, and the thinking is different from your own. The language is in you, but it’s out of you, and it doesn’t belong to you. That’s what literature can do – when you throw something in, something else comes back.

If you have faith in your writing, it’s easy. It’s when you remove that faith that things become difficult – when you start to think, this is stupid, this is idiotic, this is worthless and so on. That’s the real fight: to overcome those kinds of thoughts.