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My Novels in brief

I started writing fiction as soon as I graduated: I was twenty-three years old.

I keep considering the novel that came out incomplete. It lacks structure and has a style that is perhaps appreciable and suitable for the main character, but not very smooth for a work of modern fiction. It should be rewritten from scratch, but I don't think I'll ever do it.

Over time I have changed my writing style and I notice a continuous evolution. However, in almost all my works there is a constant: the use of the first person as a narrative technique. I feel more comfortable like this and I think it is a way to eliminate the distance between the narrator and the reader. However, it also has its limitations: the knowledge of the narrator/character becomes limited. He will never know what another character is thinking in a specific moment or what he is doing. He can at best hypothesize it. In some cases I have solved this constraint, changing the narrator, but always keeping the first person.

The first novel I consider accomplished arrived a couple of years after the first one, following a trip to China. I use the itinerant element in many of my works. In this one, I mix experiences (I had really started studying Chinese) with a fictitious story inspired by what I observed during my trip.

I wrote another shortly thereafter, but I don't consider this one accomplished too, despite being complete. And I exclude it from counting. What's wrong with this novel? I wouldn't be able to say it either, but I'm not fond of it and I remember very little about its structure and contents. So, are the bad ones more than good ones? In fact, no. Only those two, I consider the following ones complete and coherent.

In one of them, I mask a story of friendship to speak of others topics (which I don't want to disclose here): that's what I also do in the last one I wrote. But of the latter, I can at least say that I use again the element of traveling and that, in large part, it is set in Istanbul. I talk about it in this article on the travel blog, it also contains excerpts from the novel itself.

In both, I use the personalities of my two best friends and create the characters around them. I myself am curious to see how the characters attributable to them differ after almost ten years.

But I also learned something over time: not to insist to insert content by force, simply because I want to talk about it. Sometimes I made this mistake, now not anymore: there is this space for free thoughts.

Then I get to write even a trilogy, but in reality I don't write it all in a row. And to tell the truth, it's not really a real trilogy: I only use the same characters, but the novels are essentially three different genres. In common they only have the fact that they are partially set in Taiwan, a country that I know very well having married a Taiwanese, and the main characters.

The first of them is an introductory novel, the simplest I have written. Yes, I deal with delicate themes such as that of a sought-after solitude and the call of real life, but I also take this opportunity to present a country not well known to Westerners.

The second of this "trilogy" is essentially a sentimental novel: it was what I needed to write at the time. The last one, however, tells a story of self-discovery, and it approaches philosophy in some traits.

There is another, written in the middle of this trilogy. I was going through a period of personal difficulty. And I reflect it in this work, in which the main protagonist takes refuge in his world and paints reality by rereading it according to his filters. It is in this case that I use a second narrator, who can provide the reader with the necessary explanations.

Someone pointed out to me that in all these works there is a recurring theme. Which? I will talk about it extensively in these pages, in the next articles of Keyboard Echoes.