How I Finished My Novel by Moving to Berlin, Playing Pokémon Go, and Walking a Dog Named Lenny
In the summer of 2016, I decided to escape Montreal for six weeks to live in a makeshift room in a pantry at my friends’ apartment in Berlin. My only goal in traveling to Germany was to use this period of my life as a sort of pseudo-artist residency to finish the last draft of my second novel, which I had been working on for almost three years. I knew the book’s last chapter wasn’t working and needed to be rewritten, but I now felt a kind of nausea whenever I opened the Word document that contained my novel. I had, I knew, been staring at the same words for way too long. Shouldn’t I be done writing you by now? I thought, yelling at the Word document in my head. Why aren’t you done being written? Do I have to do everything around here?
Traveling to a foreign country to stare at the same words, I thought, might help make them feel new to me.
I arrived in the city late at night, and felt destroyed by jet lag. Since I don’t speak German, navigating the public transport system was confusing at first, as every word in German looked to me like a different misspelling of the word “skateboard.” Trying to figure out if the bus I was sitting on was heading in the right direction, I began to feel more empathy for my Anglophone friends in Montreal, who have to function in life without being able to read signs in French.
Looking out the window, I started wondering what kind of person I would become in Berlin, what effect this new environment would have on me. Then I noticed a completely normal Subway restaurant next to a Starbucks on a street
