How to start writing (like it's easy)

"A really, really good book can have a devastating effect on the soul. This morning, I finished Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind. It's an excellent book. More than that - it's one of those stories that alter you. The kind that settles under your skin and stays there. The whole novel feels unreal and hyper-real at the same time - like being transported into a warm cocoon of someone else's flesh, breathing their air, sensing the world through their nerves."

"But it is dramatic. It's that good. There's a reason it was Kurt Cobain's favorite book. When I finish something like this - and because I am a writer, a User Experience Writer at that ( which, in my darker moods, feels like I failed at every other kind of writing) - when I close a book like this, there's always a thought in the back of my mind. A poisonous one."

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer produces an immersive sensation of inhabiting another person's body, with hyper-real sensory detail that feels both unreal and intensely immediate. The narrative conveys being transported into a warm cocoon of someone else's flesh, breathing their air, and sensing the world through their nerves. The book's drama and craftsmanship are striking enough to be cited as Kurt Cobain's favorite. A close experience induces lingering effects that settle under the skin. For a reader who works in User Experience, finishing such a book triggers poisonous self-doubt: the belief that one could never create anything comparable.

Read at Medium