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It sounds strange, I know. Everyone types. I typed for years too, and my texts always felt somehow rushed. As if my fingers were faster than my thoughts — and somehow the machine always won.

Handwriting slows you down. That's the whole secret.

When I write by hand, I can't "undo" — I can only move forward. The cursor isn't there to pull me back to the previous sentence. No formatting, no font size, no unconscious editing. Just the sentence, and what comes after.

But that's only the surface.

The real difference runs deeper. A physical connection forms between pen and paper — the hand feels pressure, the letters are uneven, sometimes the ink pauses, and for a moment there is silence. The best sentences are born in that silence. Not through the rattling of a keyboard, but in that small pause when the pen lifts from the page.

I've found that first drafts written by hand carry far more honesty. The characters don't say things that "sound good" — they say what comes out of them. Exactly what they should say in a first encounter. On the computer I edit them before they've even spoken. In the notebook they speak — I just follow my hand.

There's one more thing I rarely talk about: the notebook doesn't judge.

The screen somehow always expects finished text. The blank Word document looks at me as if to say: now write something good. The notebook doesn't look at all. I can write nonsense, half-finished sentences, draw a tree in the margin if I feel like it — and nothing is lost, nothing ends up in the "trash." Everything stays, leaves a mark, and often that "useless" line leads somewhere I never planned.

The Wanderers also started in a notebook — but nothing from that first notebook survived. The early versions moved slowly, sometimes a draft was lost, sometimes an entire written chapter. Years passed. Then competing authors' works appeared, with breakthrough success — and I realised I had to cut half the chapters, or people might think I had copied from them.

The missing parts had to be replaced — with new ideas, new chapters. By the time it was finished, I had thought through the whole thing countless times, imagined every thread, every character, every location again and again. I lived in that world for years.

Perhaps that's why it became so detailed. Perhaps that's why it feels real. I didn't plan it that way — but looking back, I feel that constraint was the best editor I ever worked with.

The computer is for the final text. The notebook is for thinking.

Whenever I get stuck on a scene — and everyone gets stuck, I can say that freely — I pick up the pen again. I put the laptop aside, take a blank sheet, and start writing by hand what I feel about that scene. Not what's in the text. What I feel about it. It almost always works.

I can't fully explain why. Perhaps because the hand is closer to the heart than thought. Or simply because slowness itself is the cure.

Every chapter has that one sentence. Not the first — that's just the door. But the one after which the chapter takes off and practically writes itself.

In Chapter 13 it was: "The news arrived like radiation after a neutron bomb — invisibly, unstoppably, permeating everything." I wrote it down and just kept writing. One thing followed another, all the way to the end of the chapter — I couldn't stop. If I had stopped, the idea would have escaped. I've learned that. Inspiration doesn't wait.

Afterwards I go back, re-read, change things, refine. But the skeleton is already there — it just needs to be written around.

That's always what I'm looking for. The sentence that sets things in motion.

When I first read the English translation of The Little Turtle, a strange feeling came over me. I knew the text — I had written it. Yet it felt unfamiliar. Not worse. Just different.

Translation is not copying. Translation is interpretation — just as much a creative act as writing the original, only approached from a different direction. The translator also makes decisions, at every sentence. What to keep, what to let go, what to invent instead.

In Hungarian the little turtle is lassú — slow. In Hungarian that word is heavy, dense, you can almost hear the weight of the steps in it. In English: slow. A light word, almost floating. The turtle's character is the same in both languages — but the sound is different. That's not a loss. That's transformation.

What it loses: the rhythm, the sound, the cultural layers behind the words. What it gains: new readers, new interpretations, sometimes meanings the original text didn't carry but the translation accidentally found.

The most surprising response I received came from a Finnish reader. She wrote that the book was "about silence." In Hungarian no one ever spoke of that — everyone highlighted friendship, perseverance. Something shifted in the Finnish translation, and the reader found something different in it. Not wrong. Just different.

Since then I think of translations as parallel books. Grown from the same seed, but under a different sky.

From the very beginning there was a thought I couldn't shake: how wonderful it would be if a reader could listen to music while reading a book. Not background music — but something that speaks precisely to the world they have just entered.

A book stirs the imagination and fantasy. It builds images, moods, faces from words. Music completes this — it continues where the words end. It speaks on a different channel, but from the same place.

That's why I wrote music for the book. Not as illustration, not as promotion — but because I felt that the two together are more than either alone. The reader opens the book, begins to read, and meanwhile the music plays — and something comes together that neither could have achieved separately.

I don't know if this is a unique idea. But I know it felt natural to me. The book and the music come from the same place — they just arrive by different roads.

I didn't even know what writer's block was when I started writing. Fortunately.

If there's no idea, writing is pointless. If there is one — why limit yourself with a block? The most important thing is to write. Boldly, everything — whether the idea is good or not. And with equal boldness, to delete.

The latter is harder. Because sometimes the part that cost the most work is the one you finally have to cut. There were times when a brilliant chapter was built with many hours of work, the whole book was constructed around it — and in the end that one chapter simply didn't fit. It turned out not to be as great as I thought. It had to be deleted.

That hurts. But if you leave it in, the whole book suffers for it.

Writing is courage. Writing and deleting take equal courage.