As I left home and when for a walk snow fell, powdering the road and vegetation. My mind was full of winter fantasies as motes gently drifted down. A winter wonderland, I thought. The fresh snow made a satisfying crunch as I stepped. I didn’t have a destination in mind, I just wanted to go for a walk when the snow was still beautiful. My internal routing lead me through the town belt where all the native plants were accented with white. The birds were chittering, although they weren’t singing like usual for this time of day. I could see other footprints in the snow. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one who had the idea of going for a walk this morning. The flurries of snow were already obscuring these footprints.When I got to town, it was neither busy, nor empty. The gravel trucks had already been through town and were probably making their way through the suburbs. The roads were clear of most snow, due traffic and town being at a lower altitude than the rest of the city. I wondered how much snow would have already fallen high up of the hills. Probably a lot.I thought it was time to go to a café to enjoy a cosy atmosphere to read a book. I soon found one that suited my requirements. I ordered a coffee and a piece of cake, and sat down, looking outside at the snow falling. I found it pleasant sitting there, rereading a book that I was already familiar with. I let the ambiance wash over me; I could hear the chatter of people, presumably talking about the weather. Music drifted around their words, weaving in and out, but never taking centre stage in my mind. I thought, I wasn’t planning on spending that long in this café. Adventure awaits. Also, I was in the mood to visit some bookstores.The world split open like an egg revealing its juicy innards, and we transitioned into the bookstore. What more can I say? It was a bookstore, and it was aight. There were books there and I wandered the shelves for a while, contemplating the titles, covers and authors.You ask, when does the plot begin? All that has been described so far is a normal snowy day. When does the action, or the romance begin? I don’t know, to be honest. I like to describe things in a naturalistic style, with occasional surreal moments sprinkled in. Maybe my brain doesn’t think it plot beats. You continue reading.I select a book and buy it. Today I don’t talk to the store clerk outside of the motions necessary for the transaction. My mind is elsewhere. I’m not overly social in this moment. Although, if someone were to start a conversation, I would no doubt get swept away in that conversation.I could narrate the rest of my day wandering around town, but I’m not sure what you’d glean from that. The text would be full of details of me going to various shops, maybe buying an item or two. Then going to a café to read and eat lunch. You’d get my thoughts on various things. I’m going to say those thoughts are nothing interesting. You might find out what I think about the various characters I meet; the various places, of what they are like on a winter’s day; and about the food I eat. You say, what do I think about all this? It’s all feelings and sensations. None of it really means anything.Is there really nothing else to say about this day? Not really.When I started this story, I thought I was going to use this as an opportunity to practice some magical realism techniques. I was going to talk about how the food I ate melting the surrounding snow in a pocket of warmth. And how the plant life in that pocket bloomed with brilliant summer flowers. But I instead told a story a normal day in the snow. I thought about the people I’m meet in town, but then I felt weird writing about even caricatures of people I’ve known. I guess we can end this story here, unless I wish to continue this metafictional element of you reading my story and me writing about that reading. Which is weird to think about, especially since at this present moment I am both the reader and author.What is a story?Today I watched some movies. I watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vagas and Perfect Blue. They were very different movies, and both quite good too. I used to watch a lot of movies. We would get out five a week from the video rental shop, and I would watch 3 or 4 of them, depending on how interesting they seemed to me. The movies we got out were never the recent blockbusters; most of them were art house or thrillers. I never liked horror movies, so I avoided those. Although I went through quite a thriller phase. Some movies were good. Some were just ok. Mostly we were pretty good at avoiding trashy ones.I will concede the point there is an art to writing a good film script. And an art to translating a script into film. Some things that can be expressed better in words and others are better to be shown than described.“Who’s going to read these words?” Stephen Dedalus thinks in Ulysses, and I echo that sentiment. Who is going to be the audience for my musings, or is it just going to be me? Will these words be published and circulated? I believe there is merit in creating art, even without an intended audience. Creating art is not all about making grandiose statements and commercial appeal. You know, some people might relate to these musing. These people might say, a-hah. This puts words to thoughts which I have been struggling to articulate. Maybe it’s these small acts of creation which will compound and become a novel. Maybe that novel will be recognised as a voice of a generation. Maybe I am getting ahead of myself. Did Marcus Aurelius realise that his diary would become an important text to future generations? Regarding these possibilities, “they are not to be thought away”.All this writing is nonsense. I should focus on a setting and plot which is prescribed to me by the masses championed by writers who found commercial success. They say I aught to write their way and follow the steps they have taken, and I too can be successful. I want to reject these notions of other writers of how I should write. I want to, but when I write words just come out. The experience of writing is just one of my consciousness being unbound and flowing whatever why it chooses. Sometimes it doesn’t flow the way I think it should, because my mind’s myriad labyrinthine corridors weren’t arranged the way that I think they were. Only in the act of writing, the true shape of my conscious mind reveals itself.Why then does my mind race with ideas before bed? Why does inspiration seem to strike at inconvenient times? Whenever I sit down to write anything I always end up with unusual results. Maybe this is because I have given myself the agency to talk to myself; or because writing forces me to organise my thoughts in a coherent manner. I can’t get away with my thoughts trailing off because there is a record of what came before. Maybe writing is a medium that I have a knack for, which is weird to me because I never did well at English at school, but then again, I never wrote much during those days except what I had to, so I never had the practice to hone those skills. Not just that, I have also read a lot of literature in the time since then.It is odd that I came to read as much as I do these days. I like to say that I read a lot compared to someone who doesn’t read, and not a lot compared to someone who does. Which is to say I read often, just that people who read more that me tend to read much more. I am fortunate I was read to as a child. I was engaged in stories. And at some point, I started picking up books from the school library. There were far fewer digital distractions then, and TV only played shows that I was interested in for a narrow band of time each day. So, I guess I had to fill in my own time somehow, and that for a time was reading children’s fantasy books. I tended to stick with only a few a few authors. I didn’t really branch out that much. This continued into intermediate, but when high school rolled around, I had basically stopped reading outside some manga.I am glad that I found some manga to keep me going through those years. While I didn’t read much prose, I was engaging in visual storytelling. Storytelling that required reading, and not just a passive activity of watching. Manga showed me stories that I couldn’t have conceived of otherwise and had a real emotional richness to them. But I do wish now that I read more novels and prose fiction in that time too.I got into reading again by pure happenstance. More of a self-imposed challenge to push to bounds of what I was exposing myself to. Although I can confidently cite that A Song of Ice and Fire books were what got me reading again. Without them I wouldn’t have read more that a handful of books in my adult life, and for that I am truly grateful. I will always be indebted to George R. R. Martin for hooking my adult brain on the power of words.I started this with some fictional setting and then it quickly turns into a non-fictional essay on my thoughts towards writing by way of a postmodern intermediary. I think my writing turns out this way is because when I start writing I start being honest with myself. I can’t hide myself in a veil of delusion what I must be passively doing for the rest of the time. Instead, I find writing to be an act of self-reinvention. I am simultaneously looking at myself of how I am and also discovering who I aught to be. When I get into the flow of writing I also put aside pretentions of who I thought I was and what other writers think I should be like. I am kind of hungry right now, so I think I’ll end this writing session here and make some food. Food has been acquired. Back to our regularly scheduled program.I am going to borrow some of Haruki Murakami’s metaphors to describe the act of writing. I need to plumb the depths of myself and enter the subterranean caverns of my mind to uncover things. In that regard, writing is a form of spelunking. Some parts of the caverns are difficult to access, but when you find they open out into large pockets of untapped potential. It is as if you had these characters and plots and settings within you this whole time, but you were never aware of their existence, nor were they accessible by conventional manners. You had to explore the depths in order to uncover them.Back to the character wandering a winter city. How is he? Is this person me? Does this person have a name? Is having a name relevant to this story. Many of Murakami’s early novels had unnamed protagonists, and that kind of works. It is a very deliberate stylistic decision to not give characters names. And in the case of Murakami’s early works, it kind of works.Sure, it would be nice to know more about this character. What are his likes and dislikes. Where does he differ from me the author as a person. Why was the transition to going to the bookstore likened to an egg splitting open? Maybe, if I write more about this character, I will discover more about them? I think that is likely. We should have a peek to see how he is doing.I returned home. There wasn’t too much to do in town after I had purchased a new book. I probably wouldn’t read that book today, and there is a chance I would put it down and forget about it at home.It had stopped snowing, but the sky was still overcast. I caught the bus home and spent the bus ride listening to the rumble of the engine and a radio show the driver was listening to. I didn’t read on the bus. I find I get interrupted too often by the stopping and starting of the bus to get into a book. Also, I might find that I get motion sick by looking down. I’m better off letting my mind wander while I wait for my bus stop to come up. The view from the bus was mildly interesting because the surroundings had been transformed by the snow into something that was recognisable, yet distinctly different from what I was used to. My stop arrived and I got off and walked the five-minute walk to mine.There were many sets of footprints on the footpath in front of mine where there had previously been only one set – my own – this morning. I went inside and put of the heating and made myself a mug of tea, curling up on the couch with a blanket. Today is a good day, I thought.