Living lives and visions

 My lovely, fits-in-the-palm-of-my-hand (and in my pocket), 

beautifully bound copy of Dracula

Living other people's lives

I have been reading Bram Stoker's great epistolary Gothic novel, Dracula, for the very first time, and it is getting really scary.

As I was walking from the underground looking up to see what sort of moon if any I could see. I was thinking about why it is that I so love the book. Is it because of the long descriptions that I can walk into – into the character of people, and rooms and places? This is how I like to be drawn into a story and how I try to draw people into my own stories. I can only dream of ever being able to do it as well as Mr Stoker.

Other lives, other visions

And yes, what I also love is how the story is told by so many people, how we are treated to peeps into privately written dear diaries, all those personal things that you write in a journal, stuff that might be eventually read after your death but is really first and foremost only for the writer, a way of recording events, feelings, reactions etc.  As I read it I feel like I am intruding a little bit into someone's secret worlds, in this case many people's secret worlds

I really love the idea of writing the journal of someone else, in the style of someone else, trying to describe the feelings that a different character may have and how someone else might see the world. I believe that people see colours differently, shapes differently. I see car headlight as stars or groups of stars but I suppose that some people see them as they actually are, as round yellowy circles of light. I think that different people see many things differently but not only because of the physical make-up of the eyes but because of the psychological connections attached, through their experiences throughout life.

I wonder how easy I would find it to pretend to be writing something that someone else has experienced, someone with a different background to my own. That is what Bram Stoker does so really well.