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“I found writing brought me great joy, so I kept going”

Interview with Bulgarian author Ina Vultchanova

 

Bulgarian producer and radio dramatist Ina Vultchanova had initially no plans to start writing fiction and somehow stumbled into in, yet once she started she found critical success and great personal joy in the process.

 

“I had no intention of writing, but when that happened I found that writing novels was very engaging and brought great joy to me. This was the reason I kept going,” Vultchanova said, speaking ahead of her appearance at the 6th EU-China International Literary Festival.

 

“Мy case is a bit weird because I’ve never dreamt of writing a novel, I’ve never had such plans. The position of an editor and a critic was fully rewarding and I was proud to feel professional in this field. I think I started writing out of anger. I arrived in Sozopol, a small town on the coast, where I had spent many years as a child. I hadn’t been there in four or five years, and what I saw terrified me.”

 

“The old fisherman’s houses and the narrow streets were disappearing and giving in to greed and redevelopment, ugly concrete monstrosities were being built in my favorite wild coves, and the fig trees had been uprooted. My Sozopol was gone. An angry monologue started sounding in my head and I bought a notebook, hoping that if I wrote it down it would stop ringing. Two days later, I realized that I was writing a novel, and not an angry one at that. I was lovingly bringing the sunken Sozopol back to life. Perhaps this is one of the purposes of writing – keeping things that existed safe from oblivion.”

 

The novel that came from that, The Sinking of Sozopol , was adapted for film and met with great success. In 2014, Vultchanova was  awarded the National Golden Rose Prize for the film script;  in 2015 the film won the Best Foreign Film award of the New York City International Film Festival and the Best Ensemble Cast award at the Milano Film Festival;  in 2016 it received the Grand Prix of the Prague Independent Film Festival. The film success came as a pleasant surprise to Vultchanova, who had initially not envisioned the novel as being suitable for adaptation.

 

“I was very surprised when the director Kostadin Bonev asked me to write a screenplay for The Sinking of Sozopol, because I never imagined that a film could come out of this book. The novel was written in the first person, and it seemed to me that without the voice and presence of the narrator it would simply fall apart. But the temptation was too big and I accepted. I had written the novel in two months, and I worked on the script for three years – I completed eight drafts. Things were constantly changing, because when you write a novel you are alone and free, and when you write a screenplay you depend on the opinion and requirements of many other people.”

 

While it was difficult and something of a challenge, it was one she relished and would readily take up again.

 

“The work was hard, interesting and painful – I realized that the script I was writing was moving further and further away from the things I wanted to say with the novel. I had to either give up or accept the fact that this was not my novel, but a film with the same title and the author of this film was the director, because that’s the way it is in cinema. I do not regret at all that I took part in this adventure and I would do it again. But writing novels is much easier for me.”

 

Her professional career working in the field of audio drama has been a big influence on her writing career, Vultchanova believes. “I’m sure this job gave me a lot. For years I have been making radio drama with the best Bulgarian writers and playwrights and I must have learnt something from them. And audio drama teaches you discipline because it is a very short and concise genre in which there is no room for anything superfluous. I like to write dialogues and I think I feel most confident in dialogues.”

 

Her skill in writing authoritative dialogues was apparent in the acclaimed novel The Crack-up Island, which won the European Prize for Literature. Despite referring to the concept of “cracking up” in the title, the novel is certainly not despair-laden, she said.

 

The Crack-up Island is not a gloomy novel, don’t be fooled by the title. I hope I even managed to make it a little bit funny. It tells of the drive to have complete control over the world and the longing to be free. It’s also about the strange thing we call ‘fate’. The moves of fate always hide a certain irony.”

 

The novel is about two women who tell their own stories. “Each of them knows only her part of the tale and the individual pieces must be arranged like a jigsaw puzzle. The book is about the personal universes we live in – how they differ from each other and how they are similar. It is about women, men, children and cats. It is also about an island. It tells about zodiac signs and the big lottery prize. But it doesn’t tell of a crash.”

 

Vultchanova said she intends to keep writing for as long as she finds joy in the process. “If writing stops bringing me pleasure, I’ll probably stop writing. I don’t know if this is good advice for people who are striving to build a successful career, but I believe that there is no greater luxury than doing what brings you joy. Write if you feel like writing and when you feel like writing,” she said.