One of the books that every aspiring writer today should read is While i write, Stephen King. The other may be this: Frantumaglia, by the controversial Elena Ferrante. Controversial in several ways, firstly because it was considered that under that pseudonym there would only be smoke, and secondly because it was considered that such a discovery could have been a marketing technique ... the doubt will always be there.
But objectively, whoever is the author behind, Elena Ferrante he knows what is being talked about when he writes, and even more so if what he is talking about is precisely the act of writing. As on many other occasions, it never hurts to start with the anecdotal to go deeper into an issue.
The anecdote in this essay that is going to tell us about the creative process is about the word frantumaglia itself. A term from the author's own family environment that was used to define strange sensations, badly recorded memories, deja vú and some other perceptions accumulated in some remote space between memory and knowledge.
A writer affected by this frantumaglia has much gained in that quick start in front of the blank page, these sensations result in profuse and novel ideas on any topic to be discussed or any scenario to describe or any suggestive metaphor to include.
And so, from the anecdote, we approach Elena Ferrante's desk, where she keeps her books, her story sketches and her motivations for writing. A desk where everything is born random and ends up subjected to an order that ends up counteracting chance and inspiration.
Because the letters, interviews and conferences that are included in this book were born there, on that sober and magical desk. And through that almost epistolary narrative we reach the most intimate level of the writer, where the need to write, the creativity that drives it and the discipline that ends up riding it all intermingle.
You can buy the book frantumaglia, Elena Ferrante's latest book, here:
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