The Dream Will Always Live On, if I Do the Necessary to Nourish It

What is success? What is failure?

Well — what stupid questions!

Everyone knows that success is when you win, when you earn lots of money, when you reach your goals.

And failure — yeah, everyone knows that failure is when you lose, when you do not gain even small amounts of money, when you don’t reach your goals.

It is as simple as that!

Or is it not?

Throughout my life I have found myself face to face with a certain number of challenges. I will not reveal all of them here, but I am now going to share my thoughts about some of them.

I have published five fiction books: three novels that are rather traditional in their form, and one experimental novel. I also many years ago published a short story that was selected and published as one of 23 winners in a national short story writing competition. After the four novels I finally last year published a collection of poems. I do not know today if I will publish more fiction books, time will show, as they say. But what is certain, is that I will continue to write fiction texts.

My five books were published over a very long period in my life. The first one, «Stupet» (The Precipice), was published in 1978, the short story «Mariken Mustang» appeared in 1981, and my second novel, «Tellus 89», came in the year of 1982.

Then I had a very long pause, until I published the third novel, «Fabrikken» (The Factory) in 2008. Then I had another pause from publishing books. But two years ago I published the experimental novel «Den andre» (The Other One), and in 2017 came my first collection of poems, «Hjartet blir aldri fullt» (The Heart Never Becomes Full).

My first three books and the short story were published in periods of my life when I was working full time as a teacher in Upper Secondary School. First, I was a teacher, then secretly in the shadows and during the nights, writer and novelist, creator of stories and poems. I felt that writing and publishing these novels were kind of extra bonuses for me. I just had to do it! But I have never thought of writing and publishing these books as a kind of special achievement or that I was especially clever or was doing something uncommon or exceptional.

Now, at the age of 70, having ended my career as a teacher, I can look back. I can try to take a proper look at it, and I can see myself from a different perspective: during this period of 40 years, I was first of all a teacher working full time teaching at school and preparing for teaching at home. Secondly, I was a mostly secret fiction writer, bearing inside me for all those years the urge to create and write down the stories from the hidden universes of the children, women and men that I carried inside me.

Now my vision and focus have changed, and — very important! — I have more time than ever before to cultivate my favorite activity: thinking, imagining situations, realities, conflicts and lives with love, indifference and hatred. I have got the time to create with words the characters, stories, atmospheres and moods that live inside me.

When I think back to the first period, some 35 to 40 years ago, when I published my first two novels, I remember that I felt a strong drive inside me that forced me and encouraged me to write. I simply had to sit down with the typewriter, and I remember that there were nights when I tried to persuade myself to believe that I could make it without sleeping through a night or two. That was of course a stupid idea, but I confess, I manipulated myself to believe in it, and I tried, yes, I really tried hard to work through a night or two with the typewriter on the table in front of me, without sleeping!

I gave my first novel the title «Stupet» (The Precipice). It was written based on the existential anxiety that I experienced at the time. On the back cover of «Stupet» the publishing house wrote:

The young man in this novel is both really and imagined ill, and tries in many ways to take a powerful goodbye with life. Thus, he comes closer to other human beings, and his introvert speculations turn into sharp observations. Humans in society are like himself cold, manipulative, without the will to distinguish between the true and the false. The situation has become serious for everyone. The confusing diagnoses of the young man are ultimately put out of power, because the decisive Precipice turns out to be something else than what the doctors and he himself had expected.

Four years later I published «Tellus 89», a novel that can be characterized as dystopic. On the back cover of «Tellus 89» the publisher wrote:

This is Øivind H. Solheim’s first novel after the debut with “Stupet” in 1978. Here the author presents a highly current material: arms race, peace movement and nuclear war. The book is a future novel that predicts that the mass-destructive disaster happens at the end of this decade.

Some years after the publication of these two novels, I sent to a publisher a draft for a novel, but it was unsuccessful. The publisher wrote back to me that the project was not good enough for publishing. At present I have almost forgotten what this novel project was about, and I am not going to try to reanimate it. That is a lesson that I have learned. What is done, is done. What is gone, is gone.

25 years after the publication of «Tellus 89» I started the huge work of writing a 365 pages long novel. In fact, during all those years I never completely stopped writing fiction. Then — as well as now — I almost daily get new writing ideas. I write them down, and then I later take a look at them to see if they are interesting. Most often it ends there.

But a few times I persevere, like I did when I wrote «Fabrikken». This is a story that is told over a period of 45 years. The characters and the action are from the town where I was born and grew up, Odda (Norway). The factory (the smelter) was my father’s work place for a period of 35 years, and it had a dominant place in the town, both physically and in all other ways. The smelter was the main work place in Odda, it was very polluting, and it lived its secret life behind its fences, producing smoke and warmth, lights, noises and lightnings. The product outcome was carbide.

The Dream: Success or Failure?

It would be easy to classify all of my published book as failures. None of them got fabulous reviews, none of them sold more than a small number of copies, except from the 1000 copies of each of my three first novels, which were selected by the National Purchasing Program for distribution to the libraries all over the country.

The two first novels got a big number of reviews, and many of them were fairly good. The number of reviews declined for each new book. I got radically fewer reviews for my third novel, and I know that this is partly due to the general decline in the number of book reviews, which is due to the internet taking over the market after the millennium.

My preliminary conclusion is for these reasons that

- my writing experience was no success, nor was it a failure.

- my writing experience is something else

My writing experience has taught me a few positive lessons:

• It is possible for me to write stories and poems and enjoy doing it, knowing that readers will read what I write if I publish them.
• It is possible to do this for one reason: that I go fully with all my power and all my resources into the project and that I go ahead just like I would carry a baby child carefully in my arms towards the light and the warmth.
• I can publish my fiction through a publishing house if I write good enough and if I meet with a need or a trend in the market and in the world of books.
• Self-publishing: I can publish my books myself, and I have experienced that it does not take too much resources, energy and work to do so.
• Selling books: I can easily get my books out to the bookstores in the city where I live (and also to bookstores in other places with a few additional efforts to do so).
• I can sell books directly to potential readers, like friends and contacts
• Even without the support of the Libraries’ National Purchasing Program I can manage to sell a sufficient number of books to cover my expenses.
• Nothing is impossible, big success is rare, but I can succeed on a modest level if I am willing to put the necessary energy into it.

I am confident: The dream will always live on, if I do the necessary to nourish it.

Thank you for reading!

Øivind H. Solheim is a novel author and a nature photographer from Norway who loves writing fiction, essays and articles helping others understanding life, other humans and themselves. He has published six novels, two non-fiction books and a poetry book.

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“Make Your Dream Be Your Future​”

June 7, 2022, a note:

I happened to come across the story “It Is Time To Step Out of the Shadows…”, and I wonder if what @Javier Ortega-Araiza is talking about is some of the same thing that I’ve written about here?