The Creative Process Exhibition ist ein internationales Projekt, das an 40 führenden Universitäten rund um die Erde sowie im Netz präsentiert wird. Es enthält jeweils eine Werkprobe und ein Interview von über 100 Literaten, darunter Ikonen wie Paul Auster, Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Gaiman, Hilary Mantel und viele mehr. Meinen Beitrag findet ihr hier. Er enthält das erste Kapitel von Lügenland in der englischen Übersetzung und im Original und zum Schluss das Interview.

Meine Antwort auf die Frage Why did you become a writer? ist eigentlich die Geschichte wie und nicht warum ich zum Schreiben gekommen bin. Auf die Frage nach dem Warum habe ich keine Antwort. Es war einfach eine innere Notwendigkeit.

When I was a child I wrote stories, like many children do. They often involved horses and girls and all the sad things that happened to them, due to the fact, that they were mostly surrounded by really bad people. Eventually I stopped writing because there was so much else to do, so many experiences to be had. Finishing school, I had a brief impulse to become a writer. But as nobody encouraged me and I didn’t really know what to write about, I cast that dream aside and headed for architecture.

I completely forgot about writing until the mid-2000s. At that time, I was in a relationship with a man who wanted to write a novel, and asked if I would like to contribute. He never got started, so on a lazy Sunday I wrote a few pages using what I thought was his perspective on our relationship. When I showed it to him, he went pale. I had captured his every thought. That was the moment I realized I could do it.

It was a thoroughly unhappy relationship, and we split soon afterward. But the infection had caught me. About a year later, on a riding-holiday with my daughter, I had an accident that prevented me from working and made my every movement painful for a few weeks. Bored, I took out the first pages I had written the previous year and started to develop them into a longer piece. It came as a surprise that the further I strayed from what had actually happened, the more fun writing became. I finished the novel, but it never got published, since the small publisher with whom I had signed a contract went bankrupt during the editing process.
I began to write short stories and to take courses in creative writing. My stories got published, and a few years later, my second novel was ready.

Being asked the question: What does writing give you that life can’t? I have to say: Nothing! Writing gives me the same pleasure I get from imagining a building and how people would like to live or work in it. What’s better, though: I can do everything on my own, follow every lead I choose. That’s an incredible luxury. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite pay off as well financially, but I’ll never stop dreaming.