I woke up a few mornings ago with a book in my head. I hadn’t been planning to write another one. I hadn’t been sitting at my desk taking notes or consciously trying to turn what has happened to me into a story. The night before, I had watched a video that stayed with me. Apparently, it stayed with me much more than I realised, because my brain must have continued working on something while I was asleep. And when I woke up the next morning, almost out of nowhere, I had this thought: Fuck. I could write a book about this. Actually, I could write the book that comes after my first one.

And suddenly I could see it. Not the entire book, obviously. Not every chapter or every word. But I could see that there was something there. A story. A structure. Questions I wanted to explore. Something that had happened in my real life could become something completely different once I put it through writing. And I think this is one of the things that fascinates me most about creativity: sometimes you don’t decide to have an idea. Something happens to you, then something else touches it — a video, a sentence, an image, a conversation — and suddenly your brain makes a connection that didn’t exist the day before.

This second book will come from a period of my life that I would never have chosen as artistic material, because I would much rather some of the things behind it had never happened at all. And I think that distinction matters. I don’t believe everything happens for a reason. I don’t think painful experiences become good experiences simply because eventually we manage to create something from them. I don’t need to be grateful for something that hurt me just because one day it might become a book.

But I am fascinated by the fact that we can transform things.

Maybe that is one of the powers of making art. You don’t always get to choose the raw material life gives you, but you can sometimes choose what you do with it. Something can happen to you and remain only something that happened to you. Or, eventually, you can pick it up, examine it, pull it apart, rearrange the pieces and give it another form. A photograph. A song. A painting. A collage. A piece of clothing. A story. A book.

And perhaps this is particularly natural for me because so much of what I create already works like this. I make collages by taking fragments that originally belonged somewhere else and putting them together until they become something new. I do something similar with clothes. With photographs. With music. I take pieces, cut them, move them, layer them, distort them, put things next to each other that weren’t supposed to belong together and wait to see what appears.

Maybe writing isn’t actually that different.

What feels particularly strange is that this will be my second book. There is something about saying that sentence that still feels slightly unreal: I’m writing another book. The first one came from my life too. And now, without planning it, another part of my life seems to have found its way towards the same medium. Not because I want my life to become content, and not because everything that happens needs to be turned into art, but because sometimes creating is the way I understand what I have lived.

I don’t know exactly what this book will become yet. That’s perhaps the most exciting part. Right now it exists as an idea, a structure beginning to form, a collection of thoughts and a very strong feeling that there is something here that I need to write.

A few nights ago, it didn’t exist. Then I watched a video. I went to sleep. And the next morning, there was a book.

I couldn’t choose everything that became part of this story. But I can choose what I make from it.