Today, wandering through the pages of my books, I read this sentence, "You will die without having achieved your ultimate goal."

At first I thought, "But then again, no!" But then, as I paused for a moment, I realized that it is so, because I know that I will keep chasing that distant horizon and, with each goal achieved, another, more distant, more important goal will arise that will draw me, again, like a magnet.

That's the way I am.

This thought resurrected in me the ancient awareness that I often focus too much on the goal, on the summit to be reached, instead of on the present. And I often sacrifice my happiness, devoting myself solely on achieving that goal, instead of enjoying my daughter's smile, the smell of soffritto, the warmth of the sun on my face.

Growing up, I learned that more than the destination, the journey matters.

And more than the journey, the companionship.

It is a course of awareness whose trajectory points -- to the present. For what is the journey if not a moment of transition between past and future? And what is "companionship" if not the sum of the present instants of this journey?

Happiness is a state of being, like loneliness. It has nothing to do with contentment. In fact, we can feel lonely in a crowd and unhappy in a present in which we have everything.

How, then, not to confuse happiness and contentment?
By the simple realization that happiness does not lie in success, but in the present.

We can be happy and dissatisfied. I would go so far as to say that we must be.

This creation in which we live is not a solvable equation, but a mystery to live with, a constant variable in its inscrutable being. We must take note of its unsolvability, and this helps us shift the weight of existence to the present

One of the characters in The Labyrinth of Hope, the main character, Erik, is confronted by "SaiJanda," an Indian guru, with this very question.
And this is not the first time this has happened to me as an author.
Kato, in The Divine Adventure, is also "affected" by this existentialism, this search for meaning.

Actually, those who know me know that I love to swim in the open ocean, fueling reasoning, discussion, creative thinking. Keeping the spark lit by spinning like a top.
Because the beauty is right there in the search.

"He died happy, but dissatisfied."

Yes, that wouldn't be such a bad epitaph.

The first time I went to Lucca Comics was for Genovese's film "Superheroes."
I was not familiar with it.

I was supposed to shoot a scene in the Lucca Comics, a giant fair of comics, manga and now video games: The places where you see otaku, Naruto, Ero Sennin, Dragon Ball.

In short, that was where I was shooting the scene.

While real cartoonists were signing copies in front of me, I was behind them, and I was lucky enough to see what they do while they are waiting to sign another copy: they draw. They have their notepads, and they draw.

The amazing thing was when the author in front of me opened his notebook and stopped on a page.
It was an anatomy.
I don't remember what part of the body, but it was not comic book style. But classical.

My untrained eye was amazed at the detail of the drawing. Crazy precision with the pencil. I could feel the fine texture of the muscles, the veins. But he drew on it.

My first reaction was to think, "No way, what are you doing! You're crazy! You risk ruining everything. It's the classic mistake: one continues when one should stop!"

But then-I was making the film. So, from time to time, I had to see if in the midst of the total chaos of Lucca Comics anyone needed me.

I didn't tell you this, but the set-which is a mess in itself-if you put it in the middle of a national fair full of other creatives, it comes out fireworks.

I mean, I look around, I'm still free, and I go back to the author to see what a mess he made.
He was still drawing on the sketch from earlier.
He was covering it with his shoulder, so I couldn't see well.

Then he stepped back for a moment and, leaning his back on the chair, allowed me to see his drawing well.

It was better than before. Even more detail, even more truth.

And he continued.
He continued.

Art, technique, is a magnifying glass on reality. Those who use it, who practice it, see hairs in eggs, break stones with thought, have a superpower.

That of moving forward.

There comes a time, I think for everyone, when we choose a path. Different from the one everyone has thought for us. Even different from the one we have always thought of.

In that moment, maybe a compass is the answer to that question, "Does this choice allow me to be able to draw reality better?"

Just like that cartoonist who improved from stroke to stroke, having the ability to return once, ten times, a thousand times to a stroke,
a word,
an expression,
a tone,
a note.

Until our whole life is but
a note,
a tone,
an expression,
a word,
a stroke.
A mark.

Don't be intimidated.
An idea, when it is born, needs to be defended.
One is not born wrong: at most one becomes wrong.
It is the same with ideas: they need care, to be nurtured, like a living thing.

Ideas then imitate us.
As we behave, so they behave.
Ideas are us.

Most of the time, an idea will be considered good only after it is proven to work in reality.

But an idea is not reality any more than a map is territory.
Therefore, its realization is the natural development of the idea: the doing, the gestus.

And, after realizing it, it needs to be cleaned up and put into the world.

We cannot know how it will go in the gestational stage; we can only feel.

To feel that there is something inside us that quivers, that shines.

A spark.

On that spark blow with the beauty of knowledge.
Make it a reflection of your soul, of you.

Steal from the best, copy, follow the rhythm of the moment.

Study your surroundings, break down atoms into words, words into echoes of emotions that travel within you.

Emotion is not in a drawer: it is with you, inside you, there.

Right there.

And, like you, millions of others feel it.
Emotions unite us under the same banner, that of mystery.

We all walk toward an unknown destination.

I rarely think about the past.
I have the feeling that it is of no use, that it binds me to something that is not there.
Yet the fact that I always have this feeling is perhaps the clearest demonstration that there is something I cannot let go of.

A part of me always distances itself just enough to avoid suffering.

The fear of suffering.

Do you have it too?
I am not talking about the pain of a sting or a fall: I am talking about feeling that if you take one more step, the return, if there ever is one, will be with a broken heart.

In my life I have never broken anything, never a fracture.
My bones are made of titanium.
Maybe that's why I have a crystal heart, because my armor is better than that of the Knights of the Zodiac.

"Crystal heart" is an expression I also use in The Labyrinth of Hope.
The interesting thing is that I don't use it for one character, but for several.

Who knows, maybe for all of them.

I am writing this journal to warm up my engines.
I have finished writing the third volume.

After some comments from beta readers, I changed the ending of the second volume, but that's normal: the saga is being written, and that means changing important things: directions, endings, events.

Fortunately, the beacon that illuminates me on this journey is as bright as the moon.
Or maybe it is the moon itself.

I just read the story of the man who wrote Jingle Bells: James Lord Pierpont, born in 1822. First of all, I found out that the song did not start out as a Christmas song. But quite the opposite. (And already there, I should have known there was something to be discovered, in that story.) What is one of the most famous songs in all of history, and probably the best known Christmas song of all, began as a song about horse racing. But it doesn't end there: James had a very sad life. A life of failure and failure. As a young man, he set out to find gold to the Klondike (Chaplin's famous gold rush).
But then, unlike the Charlot, he returned empty-handed, having found nothing but calluses in his hands and broken dreams. He soon lost his first wife, who left him alone to raise their two children. It was at that time that he wrote the song.That song... so full of bells and joy, actually emerges from the grief the man was experiencing at the time. How true it is that art soothes pain. But it didn't end there! Lord Pierpont had a terrible relationship with his own brother. During the war, they found themselves on opposite sides.
What nonsense, war.And then, icing on the cake: he never made any money from that song.Often, in the music world, we talk about Mariah Carey and her Christmas song, which probably benefits her more than any other song.Think of Jingle Bells.
Think of how important that song is. How it represents the heart of the most beloved holiday for everyone, young and old. But for James, nothing. Like Melville with Moby Dick, Kafka with his lyrics, Lord Pierpont is one of that endless line of artists who have been recognized only after their deaths.

Why this anecdote? Because I wonder if it was worth it.Is it worth it to do something that remains in human culture in exchange for a lifetime of frustration? The toil of the endeavor, the toil of dreams, of the desire to leave a mark -- how far does it make sense? Now that I have discovered this story, I will think about it.When I am faced with the toil of the endeavor, at the moment when I have to ask myself, "But is it really worth it?" I will say to myself, "Who knows. But maybe, 20 years from now, you will have done your Jingle Bells."

Do you know what the amanuenses and copyists were saying when Gutenberg's invention (printing) came to disrupt the handwritten book industry? "Scriptores pereunt, ars moritur." The copyists disappear, the art dies. Many believed that printed books were mechanical objects, devoid of soul or beauty. Philip of Strata, for example, wrote in the 15th century, "Libri impressi sunt meretrices; scripti sunt virgines." Printed books are meretrici; handwritten ones, virgines. Sound familiar? The words that are spent towards generative AI are often very similar. The contempt they generate (small pun) can be reduced to this: it is a soulless product that will replace artists. But in reality, printing has exploded writing. Never were so many books written, printed and especially read after the advent of Gutenberg. To him we owe modern literature. To him the exponential development of knowledge, which led, in the centuries that followed, to the radical transformation of society, of well-being, of man. The debate about art and artificial intelligence is often approached in a prejudiced way, because it questions one of the fundamental building blocks of the artist (just like printing): execution. It is said that art is in the gesture, and that if the gesture is replaced by the machine, then there is no more art. I dare to think something different. Something that tries to go beyond the blanket of fog before which we all stand. Art is not in the execution of one of the basic building blocks, but in the intent, the idea, the execution, the distribution and the delivery. Let me explain. If a machine can do in seconds what a man can do in months, then the value of that thing immediately decays. And that is where the fear of concept artists, writers, and even actors is born. We're there now: technology is so advanced that they too can be replaced (in digital products, theater, for now, is untouched.) So are we replaceable? No. Because it is the process in its entirety that produces true value, not the individual element within the creation process. This thinking is radical, and it requires a sharp shift in perspective: It is what is called a paradigm shift. AI is here. It is like electricity, the computer, the wheel. It's there now.My purpose is to figure out how to survive and, not only that, how to thrive, now that the terrain has changed so greatly.As an artist, I am forced to reevaluate what it means to be an artist.Making art is no longer limited to the production of the single element of performance (the lyric, the song, the drawing, etc.), but to the production of the anything that could be reproduced by AI.) There is so much more. That element must be part of a larger intent, one that starts from the artist's soul (the intent), propagates into the human response to the artist's world (the idea), goes through the realization of that response (the performance) but does not end there. It needs the artist to embody the impact he or she wants to have on the world (the delivery.) In essence, it is a matter of having an idea, executing it, and then letting people know it exists. And then repeating this process, improving every step, every time. The artist then becomes the advocate of his or her own success, the one who is called upon not only to craft the elements, but for the entire artistic supply chain: from intent, to idea, to realization, to distribution and delivery. The artist is the human manifestation of the process of the entire supply chain.

And there, artificial intelligence becomes a traveling companion that allows-for the first time in forever, just like printing-to open the doors, to give the artist who wants it, the wings to fly on his or her own. It won't be easy. But if flying on their own was previously a pipe dream for artists, this revolution gives back to those who have intent, ideas, critical spirit and artistic soul the ability to make it on their own. I repeat: 1. Intent (which is nourished by culture, reading, meetings, soul food) 2. Idea (hce comes from listening to our surroundings and what we have inside) 3. Execution (our response, as artists. Our mark: writing, singing, acting, whatever you like best) 4. Distribution (marketing, digital platforms, strategy to make our response known, to give impact.) 5. Discussion with the public (interactions, social networks, a site, an artist's diary where we can exchange opinions) Art is not dead. Quite the contrary. we are about to experience an explosion of independent artists who will succeed in being as big as (or bigger than) the majors because they hold what really matters and is valuable within the supply chain: intent. The primal fire, the light

Yesterday I spoke with a writer who specializes in erotic fiction (thank you Raffaella!). I kindly asked her to give me a return regarding a "spicy" scene in the second volume of The Labyrinth of Hope.

Since I am not a reader of modern erotic fiction, I did not know where I stood, on a scale of 1 to 10.

I grew up with Manara, and those who know me know that verbal elegance is a hallmark of my poetics.

Without too much surprise, I realized that the warmth of the scene ranked around a 5-6.

With the generous advice to "dare more."

But actually - and this is where the typicality of my writer's profile kicks in - 5-6 is just fine with me!

You know it: "The Labyrinth of Hope" is a psychological thriller, a dark romance, it has a paranormal flavor, but it is modern fiction, with philosophy, learned quotations and characters that change and transform deeply.

And there are thorny scenes ("not very explicit," and I'm okay with that 🙌).

In short, my sagas, just like The Ring of Saturn, are cocktails of genres.

They are mojitos, strawberry daiquiris, pina coladas, gin and tonics.

I'm not a purist, I don't pour whiskey without ice or 36-month barreled rum in a crystal glass straight from a barrel in Cuba.

No.

I make books for everyone, that can appeal to a variety of people, each with their own key.

It is my strength, and also my weakness.

This choice of mine-derived both from my personal artistic-psychological profile and from my wanting to do business-is not without risk.

The first risk, the preponderant one waiting in the wings for me, is that no one will like me.

Let me explain.

The reader looking for the thriller immediately wants the scene of the corpse being pulled away at night in the forest by a harried man.
Those who want the erotic demand thornier descriptions.
Those who seek in-depth psychology perhaps disdain romance, et cetera...

A cocktail is likely to displease everyone.

But those who choose me do so because they are looking for something they cannot find elsewhere: a cocktail artfully made, with wisdom, balance and sensitivity, can be something truly explosive.

And ambitious.

For it is precisely by fusing genres together, combining them into one great new flavor, that a new flavor can be produced: indistinct, smooth, unique, intense and varied, leaving one wanting more.

"Saturn's Ring" is an early embryonic example of this, of my quest.

I fused romance and fantasy, with a touch of philosophy, archaeology, adventure and thriller.

I think the future of fiction is right there, in this avenue of blending.

It's no coincidence that there are already words that do the crasis of genres (romance).

And why not create new ones, and go in search of new flavors?

Here I am, I'm ready.

Step up to the bar, and I will serve you a new cocktail.

If you haven't already tried me, there are both The Divine Adventure (fantasy, science fiction, spiritual, adventure) and The Ring of Saturn (romance, fantasy, adventure, archaeology) waiting for you, waiting for you to end up in my labyrinth.

Crisis comes for everyone.Like an appointment with ourselves, there comes the wound that does not heal, that with every cycle reminds us that we have a score to settle with ourselves.By now I feel it, I recognize it, I see it coming from afar, and yet it still catches me.It catches me in the lowest, most fragile parts of my self. Those that are open to criticism, that have a seed of doubt growing with them. My fragile sides, if you will. But as I get sharper and sharper with age, more and more self-aware, the crisis becomes blurry, almost ethereal. It's there but you can't see it. It's there but I can't define it. And that makes it even harder for me to deal with. They say that if to a problem there is a solution, then there's no use worrying about it.
And if to a problem the solution is not there, then it is useless to worry as well. In short, it is useless to worry. But what if the state of mind we feel is foggy? What if the only thing we understand about our energy is the gray, dominant dimension like a winter sky? What to do? Wait for the sun? Just accept it? Or blow with all the strength we have to sweep it away? I don't know. I write this page partly out of inertia, partly because I know that writing demons brings them out and, in a sense, melts them under the sunlight.
There is little sunshine today, but who knows, maybe it will work.I have two cats.They, I have to say, are crazy.It seems like every day is a good day to cuddle with me, to be near me.One of them, Bijou, has a symbiotic relationship with me.He likes to be on my belly.
And I like to think it's to nurse me, to soak up energy, to be gentle. Sometimes I fear that silence is a gilded cage -- a place of reunion with myself that becomes an ivory tower, where I isolate myself and lose the notion of being well.
I bask in a state of mind, I lull myself in it, I lose myself in it. Those who write know: the relationship with words is something beyond spelling and grammar. It is a challenge to oneself. I turn, I turn, but I can't catch that ghost that lurks in my wake.
That thought that "something" (what, who knows?) is not exactly in place. Vagueness as an inner crisis, who would have thought it. At this point I have the doubt that, rather than crisis, this is a manifestation of intent of unresolved crisis. A mad desire I have to be this way, and since I have no appropriate justification, I accept it for what it is: undefined. And here I return to my eternal return, the continual source of my poetics: the will.
The will to be well.And the will to be sick.Could it really be so.Now I'm going for a nice walk and I'm sure that,on the way back,something will be different.Who knows,maybe I'll continue on the page after the return.-Life knocked just as I was about to leave the house.Electra has a tummy ache.I have to pick her up from school.She's fine but needs to rest,so to bed.As always,amazement is around the corner.Apparently,one only has to wait to get back on the road..

Today I woke up on the couch.I was so tired yesterday that I couldn't stand the movie on the big TV set in the living room.I only felt, late into the night, a sweet blanket wrap around me and a voice whisper goodnight to me with a kiss.I woke up around 7 a.m. The day was beautiful, already sunny early in the morning.These days I feel more tired than usual. It must be the cataracts.Think of you: I'm 45 years old and I have cataracts.It's not very rare, but it normally comes after 60.What can I say, I like to be early.My eyes are a mess, I see very little.Maybe that's why I have so much imagination.The world, without lenses, is all for me to imagine (I'm -5.25 and now -7).

In short, after waking up and having a coffee, I spent a wonderful day with friends and companion, at Lake Bracciano. Beautiful, alive, with that slight ponentino that soothes the soul and ignites it at the same time. We ate by the lake, between laughter, fish seconds (not for me, I don't like fish) and side dishes, homemade tart and a coffee. I also drove on the way back. It fatigued me a lot.With my hands on the steering wheel I was thinking about the fact that "today is one of those rare days when I don't have the computer on. "I needed rest.I needed quiet.And so I said to myself, "Today, I'm not writing. "At the end of the afternoon we drove back toward Rome, with the windows open, among the state roads, trees, green hills, and a billion people who had had the same idea as us.

Arriving within the walls of the domestic hearth, Grandma brought the baby back to us, and the family reunited in a hug, an evening, a dessert.What luck I have, I think.What luck.It is now 10 p.m. and already everyone is asleep.There is silence in the living room.
I'm writing this page sitting in an armchair, from the cell phone. I'll fix it tomorrow on the computer. A sincere flow, a stream of memories that I want to put into words. A mirror reminding me that I am, after all, a great liar. Today, I actually wrote this diary

In the next saga, I will address many dark sides of our reality.
As I like to think, if The Ring of Saturn is the sun, The Labyrinth of Hope will be the moon.
Esotericism, psychological thriller, manipulation, sects and even eroticism.
A tricky business to say the least!

I am not afraid to deal with this side of writing and storytelling, on the contrary.
I enjoy it, it amuses me and, most importantly, it liberates me.

I want this next saga to be an effigy of freedom of expression in the service of story.
Yesterday I was watching a great interview with Tarantino, in which he explained that the problem with modern stories in Hollywood cinema is that they are predictable.

Actually, I really have to agree with him: a good story reveals itself as you go along, unpredictable, like a maze.

This saga, which I am now in with feet and legs, is first and foremost a great journey, just like The Ring of Saturn.

A journey into the psyche of Erik, the protagonist, but also into my own.

I realize that the writing, in the service of the story, sometimes reflects states of mind that I am experiencing unconsciously: the desire for control, for deciding the cadence of existence.

Problems that Erik also happens to face.
In short, this adventure is turning out to be much deeper than expected.

And slowly, descending into the meanders of my unconscious, I face the gloomy, dark and fascinating places that surround the night.

Eroticism, indeed, is one of them.

I do not want to censor myself or be vulgar. Those who know me know: I do not write randomly and I am certainly not vulgar. On the contrary, I find eroticism to be the height of elegance.

It is a counterbalance to pornography, where everything is exposed.

Eroticism, on the contrary, is an allusion, a lake of ambiguity in which to make the reader dream.

Another very important thing: it must not be gratuitous. Free eroticism is vulgar, poor. Eroticism used as a thin blade, delineating the boundaries of relations between the sexes, of manipulations and unspoken, is filled with charm and psychology.

Ambiguity. It always comes back to this word, and will come back for a lot more, in this journey of mine.

One day I was asked what I brought with me from Tancredi. I think narrative ambiguity is one of them. I always struggled to give her a strong human side, an empathy that made her different from the usual villain. A man with wounds, a heart, but capable of terrible things. That made him ambiguous.

I was fascinated by the contrast he brings. So much so that I decided to write a story that, as Tarantino would have it, will unravel in its ambiguity, between bodies, seductions, illusions and deep fears.

Does eroticism scare you?

What about esotericism?

I hope not to "shock" too much those who will read me. In fact, no. I really hope I do.

What is the most difficult part of being an artist? Of being a director, an actor, a writer?

I think I could open a section of the Artist's Diary dedicated only to this phrase: "The hardest part."

It is difficult to give an answer, because facing this question means facing our weaknesses, our prejudices.

Sometimes we hide the hardest part from ourselves. We are the first to delude ourselves. Often, we are faced with difficulty and, instead of surmounting it, we change course.

How many times have we made choices dictated by fear? And how many times dictated by desire?

Perhaps that is where the hardest part for me lies: when the desire fails. I am a victim of the fascination I wish to imprint with art. I want to live fascinated; I am in my own personal labyrinth of hope.

Many years ago, a director my teacher taught me that:

"When you think 'it's too much,' that's when the work begins."

I made a mantra out of this philosophy, pushing my willpower far beyond where it was when I was in my twenties.

Fresh out of acting school, I had recovered something of myself. A passion had been ignited that set me in motion.

Yet I still sense the tendency to give up. But mind you, it is not seen as a surrender; on the contrary. More as a:

"It's time to find more green grasses."

An ungathered challenge masquerading as boredom. A superb escape.

Yes, that is precisely my weakness: I am a butterfly, a bee flying from flower to flower.

Many people don't know this, but in the course of my acting career I have worked a thousand jobs: assistant director, director, prop technician, producer, editor.

All so I could continue my dream.

I started this career by accident, if you will. A show on TV caught my eye. People improvising. And from there, acting school, theater, film, TV. All smooth sailing.

But maybe because of that, I kept nurturing the desire for more. My "real" dreams.

After saving money with Distretto di Polizia and Un medico in famiglia, I didn't buy a car or a house. I invested in a dream: that of making a video game so I could go where I dreamed of going as a child. To Los Angeles, to E3.

And there I was very lucky to be able to do that and to have found the right people for that trip.

The hard part is the luck, maybe.

And now I am in the enterprise of enterprises: producing worlds, stories, dreams, thoughts, reasoning through sagas, long novels. Dialoguing with the souls of others, beyond the present time.

In short,

I have done so many things, but I actually feel like I haven't done anything yet.

That's a strange feeling, isn't it? Does it ever happen to you?

Maybe the hardest part is to be happy with what we have.

Kato, in the finale of The Divine Adventure, wonders what he would like to feel before he dies, knowing that that feeling will be with him for eternity.

He thinks about gratitude. But then, when he is faced with death, at that decisive moment, his thoughts fall silent, and nature emerges. Relentless: the desire to live a little longer.

Moving on.

The hardest part is moving on.

But it is also the most fun.

Today through a moment of darkness, I am exhausted from my adventures.

The idea of writing another saga weighs on me more than other days.

It happens, I know, it's part of the game.

Americans call it "the grind," that thing whereby each day, one pebble after another, you build the skyscraper.

With sweat, toil and willpower.

Scrooge McDuck also said:

"You get rich one penny at a time."

But what toil.

Writing The Ring was quite a feat.

In all, if we were to view the story as a single book, we are talking about 280,000 words, roughly 1,100 to 1,200 pages.

And from writing to publication was about 12 months.

In short, I did a really intense sprint, and now I find myself a bit overwhelmed with fatigue, amazement and bewilderment.

Despite the incredible success of the saga, which is approaching the remarkable milestone of 10,000 copies sold, I am not satisfied.

Those who know me I don't think are surprised, but in this case it is a hard feeling to swallow.

I wish I were, I really do.

But the publishing venture I am building, which is slowly bearing fruit, still does not generate a sustainable harvest.

You may be because I'm just getting started, or because I've "only" written one saga, but the path to famous profitability is still a long one.

I could give up and be content.

Write unpretentiously, unhurriedly, and let my texts roam freely, in the hands of a third-party publisher who owns the rights.

But that is not for me.

I have reached an age where I need to feel that the effort I am making elevates my work.

I need to feel the enterprise coursing through my veins.

I wonder why. Maybe because my dad is an entrepreneur.

And by osmosis, despite my artistic path, this inner agent continues to yearn for maturity and success.

The entrepreneur in me has worked, over the years, to leap like a butterfly over the artist's dreams.

With the desire to make them big, unique, personal.

And now, with four volumes to write of the next saga ahead, something in me is tired.

There is a Flavius, the dissatisfied one, with the mogul suspenders and the cigar in his mouth, who says:

"No no. Now you stop and let's see how this thing goes. Let's see if this Ring saga is profitable. If not, we close up store."

And then there's the long-bearded Flavius with his hands full of digital ink, with ideas galore, scratching his head and saying:

"But no, you'll see, the next story is the right one. Take it from me, we'll make it!"

Here I am in the middle of a negotiation between my two souls.

Torn between dream and concreteness, hovering between money and dreams.

Books are strange.

And I think, as an entrepreneur, I still have a lot to learn.

For example, I don't know how long the interest in a book endures after it comes out.

In film and many other industries, the bulk of sales are made in the first few days, then comes the vertical collapse, due to daily overproduction.

I dream of slow and steady growth.

A sustainable business model, where each saga reaches its profitability point and never lets go.

An intellectual property as an immovable value.

A self-sustaining "product" that stands the test of time in both content and business model.

This is the greatest challenge I could accept with myself.

I have not achieved it yet, but I am closer than when I started.

And as one such person said:

"Poi ch'èi posato un poco il corpo lasso,

i resumed my way through the deserted shore,

so that the firm foot was always the lowest."

Often sensitivity, understood as remaining open-with a heart of living flesh in hand-to the world, is misunderstood as weakness.

As if the act of giving oneself to another, of showing oneself for who one is, is a sign of emotional instability.

Of course, it is not.

It takes much more courage to admit one's frailties, one's flaws, than it does to hide behind a mask, pointing the finger at those who do have the courage to expose themselves.

In the art of acting, for example, I learned that what gives the character an empathetic dimension are precisely his frailties. Its cracks.

Nothing is more boring than an omnipotent, omniscient character devoid of doubts.

It is precisely the doubts that lead us toward improvement. To elevate us.

In many spiritual texts we find the idea that strength lies in giving of oneself, in "turning the other cheek." Not so much out of a spirit of sacrifice, but out of real inner strength.

Only in this way do we really get in front of ourselves, and know ourselves.

Real strength comes from self-knowledge and self-acceptance. But not only that.

Also from the knowledge that this is not a path that ends with a prize because "you made it."

It is a journey. One that accompanies us to the end of this life.

And maybe even after that. Who knows.

Some time ago, in an article, I received a vitriolic comment, masquerading as "honesty," but steeped in gratuitous judgments, projections and a certain moral superiority.

That person claimed the right to evaluate my physical appearance and career-without any real context-as if he were dispensing a life lesson.

In reality, his "frankness" was just an excuse to hit back.

I am an actor.

And if there's one thing actors learn early on, it's to cash in on criticism that seems aimed not at the work, but at the person.

Because our work is our person.

The actor literally embodies the art he or she makes.

Every word, every gesture, every expression starts from within. And so any criticism is difficult to separate from identity.

For years I took criticism personally.

Maybe ruining a peaceful moment just because Titius or Caius had said something bad about me.

Then, over the years, I realized something wonderful.

We are small human beings, on a grain of sand, among billions of galaxies, also grains of sand in infinite space.

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter what they say - good or bad.

It matters what I feel.

It matters how hard I work to elevate myself, to improve myself, to surpass myself, to know myself.

This life we have is a path of knowledge.

And we should never allow the badness of others to interfere with this path.

As the inscription above the temple at Delphi said:

"Know thyself."

Gender, this seven-headed monster.

Every author has to deal with it. One must be born already categorized. You have to produce with a genre in mind.

Tough stuff.

Especially for those who love to travel with the imagination, for those who love the unknown. For those who do not know, at the beginning of the journey, what the place of destination will be like.

They say the genre is about publishers, about marketing.

Yet, as you know, I wear two hats: that of the writer and that of the person promoting the work. So I have the absurd role of bringing together two elements that should be split: creation and sales.

So it happens, at times, that I ask myself:

"But this creation of mine, what genre is it?"

And it happens to ask me during the creative process, as if, as I write, I am looking for a commercial form. An interweaving of creativity and strategy -- kind of what I am.

The Labyrinth of Hope: the dilemma of genre

I have finished the first draft of the first volume of The Labyrinth of Hope. The second one will happen only at the end of the saga, when I have completed all the volumes.

I have received the first comments from Beta Readers.

One out of all of them put me on the spot: the genre.

As you know, I write evolutionary sagas, changing from volume to volume, not only in story, but even in genres.

In The Ring of Saturn, we go from young love to dramatic love, then to thriller, to fantasy.

The Labyrinth of Hope also follows this principle. Inside there are many genres:

- psychological thriller,

- noir,

- dark romance,

- mystery.

All the "dark sides" of the human soul.

If The Ring of Saturn was the sun, The Labyrinth will be the moon.

One of the criticisms received concerns the first volume: it is not "thriller" enough.

Thriller lovers look for danger, action, urgency.

I, on the other hand, play with subtle angst, deep wounds, moral ambiguities, psychological and dramatic implications in this first volume.

Should I therefore call it a Dark Romance instead of a Psychological Thriller?

Or a Mystery Drama?

But then there is also the ambiguity of the paranormal...so?

"A psychological mystery/noir drama thriller with a slow burn dark romance."

It is quicker to read the book than the genre

As you may have guessed, pigeonholing a work into a single genre does not appeal to me.

There is only one authentic genre: Contemporary Fiction.

The rest are labels for algorithms and publishers, tools to facilitate the search for the next title, based on the assumption:

"Since you like thrillers, here are 1,000 more thrillers for you."

But what if you liked the author?

What if we saw the writer not as a mere genre performer, but as an explorer of humanity?

Stories contain romance, danger, poetry, rawness.

All of us have experienced genres in our lives.

It depends on the moment.

Genre is nothing but the flavor of a moment.

It is a snapshot of the biodiversity of energies around us.

My job? To explore the soul, embody it and give it back to you, in an engaging, exciting, pressing story.

The genre, I leave to you.

Those who have read my novels know that within them is my acting, my desire. Those who have listened to the audiobooks even more so, for I give voice to my writing. Speaker and writer, a rare thing among authors.

But those who have known me for a really long time know that my passion, perhaps second only to writing, has always been directing. I have produced and put online as many as three audiovisual products. The first was an "animation" film called Dreaming Quantum Butterflies, in which I recounted Matteo and Flavio's turbulent summer with extreme visual creativity. A summer movie with hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Then there was #bymyside, a kind of urban "Waiting for Godot," again with the same actors and life companions, who also followed me in what was then my last audio-visual venture: Days, an interactive film in which, as in Rashomon, it was possible for the viewer, to choose "who" to follow of the characters. An interaction in which what changes is not the story but the point of view. It went well, but not well enough.

Why perhaps I will talk about that later. Now I want to focus on what these experiences have brought to my writing.

Before I made these films, you should know that I had done four years of directing at the Teatro Stabile in Genoa, and as many years as an assistant director to Sciaccaluga, Langhoff, Nichetti.

In short, I have directing in my blood. I have seen all of Kubrick more than once, I love the essential aesthetic, the clean form.

When you read the pages of my books, you will take notice. The directing is there, and it has a strong cinematic flavor, I am aware of that.

I am now writing The Labyrinth of Hope, and what I do, in prose, is not writing, but describing. I try to tell, through words, the objectivity of action. To then let the creative process happen in the minds of those who read me. Writing and reading are linked by a harmonious relationship. I am but the spark that ignites the soul; the rest, the work of imagination, is done by the reader. That is why every reading is different. Because every reader has his own shade of brick red, every reader sees the snowy mountain cutting through the clouds differently.

Man is not a thinking animal, but a dreaming one.

The dream emerges from the reading that gives it its cue.

More and more I like to get lost in the prose, and then, in editing, cut a good chunk out of it to maintain the right balance, the fundamental one, that of the desire to keep reading.

Ah, right, the direction in writing!

Now, surprise, as a small foretaste of what lies ahead, I leave you with an excerpt from Labyrinth of Hope, you tell me where you see direction. If you see it. Then I will respond to you in the comments.

Small premise, this is a first draft, which I have tried to formalize as being final, in this way, it will give you an anticipation of feeling as well. The content may vary upon publication. Zero spoilers.

---

Erik arrives at the door of his apartment.

He turns the keys in the lock.

He opens it.

The smell of mold overwhelms him. Heavy. Damp. Alive.

He pauses at the threshold.

One breath. Another. Air struggles into the lungs. Too dense with the past.

He enters and closes the door behind him.

A muffled click.

Dust hovers in the moonbeams filtering through the opaque glass. The drafts seem to speak, whispering buried memories. In that silence, the echoes of a life sing. Alice's laughter in the kitchen. The sound of a plastic spoon frantically tapping on the table. The smell of coffee.

Erik turns his gaze to the hallway.

He moves closer.

He stops in front of a door. It has a faded sticker at its center. A red heart, fixed with colored pins.

An inscription.

---

(That's not what it says)

We are consciousness, we are passion, and we nurture the desire for transformation and life.

We constantly live between the swings of time, between journeys in the self and the world.

I am tackling the themes of the occult: starting with the milder ones, such as astrology and tarot card reading, and moving on to divination and more, all within a psychological thriller.

You might say: so are you writing a paranormal thriller?

No, not exactly. I want to focus on the ambiguity that reigns in the world of perceptions, ghosts and psychology.

Psyche, for the Greeks, was a goddess: she had a body, she existed as such.

Now, for us, psyche has attained a much more abstract form and yet just as concrete-if not more so-than a goddess in Olympus.

We create manifestations of reality and, slowly, uncover its details, helping to define its design.

It is our projections that shape reality, and this is also true in the occult.

Something becomes true if you believe in it enough.

And, given my love of parables, metaphors and fantastic stories-which are actually very pragmatic and real-I chose to address the ambiguity of the real in the psychological thriller.

What, if not a manipulation of reality through the occult, can embody mad desire, passion, love?

In psychology, we often talk about removal, about forgetting a tragic event in order to survive the everyday.

Actually, what differentiates this from a ghost that returns to inhabit reality because it is not ready to let go?

Both are ethereal, elusive, and yet profoundly transform the individual who experiences them.

In this analogy, between the ghost and consciousness, between guilt and vision, my story unfolds.

A place where overwhelming passions ignite without resistance, where barriers collapse, hearts explode and, perhaps, souls heal.

An odyssey in the genres of ambiguity and tension.

A journey also into eroticism, manipulation, the occult and magic.

But, above all, a journey into the souls of my characters, of whom I discover, every day, facets I had not grasped.

Every day they become more and more human, more and more nuanced and, in a way, more and more ambiguous.

The beauty of writing, for me, lies precisely in the opportunity to explore fields of knowledge that I would not otherwise have known.

It is like traveling with my mind.

I thus discover that the dimensions that surround me are as many as the people who experience this reality.

In fact, many more, because Erik, Morgana, Eurydice, Paul, Aurora are, for me, people who exist, who think, who have a vision of good and evil and problems to solve.

I have delivered the first volume to the beta readers and am getting initial feedback, which is very helpful, especially in understanding whether the style, verbal structure and flow of events are effective.

This saga is a really rich creative adventure, one that has me on the ropes as early as the second volume.

Everything flows in a more subtle, sneaky way.

It is also a labyrinth for me, of which I know "more or less" the ending, but which forces me, each time, to rewrite what I thought would happen.

I am at a crossroads.

I have written the first volume of my next saga, "The Labyrinth of Hope." Now I've paused for a moment to breathe and plan the next one.

And in the meantime, I am dabbling in what might be the style of the covers. I envision the design, not just the story. You know me, I'm a volcano.

But now, what matters, more than anything else, is the story.

I already have in my head what to tell in subsequent volumes, but I have to structure the narrative.

What do I mean by structuring?

I mean breaking the narrative into small pieces, smaller and smaller fragments: chapters, scenes, moments, sentences, words..

And there are two possibilities: I can fragment by adding more narrative lines, or I can avoid adding any and follow a single thread.

In which case does one suit, and in which does the other?

Especially when it comes to a saga, it is not an easy answer.

Multiple threads allow the reader to be immersed in a complex world, encourage the parallel development of many characters, even secondary ones, and create variety of rhythms.

I could switch from a tragic to a light register with a simple change of "story line," and this applies to themes as well.

If the "youth" line is about adolescent issues, the "adult" line may deal with themes more akin to the age group of the protagonists.

As you can imagine, the multiple line is the most widely used in modern writing because of the influence of TV seriality.

But there are advantages to the good old single line as well.

If the protagonist is strong and his or her journey is what really matters, then going to multiple lines is even detrimental, because it not only dilutes the story, but also moves away from the beating heart of the narrative.

Moreover, if actions happen sequentially and progressively, the single line is more powerful.

The single line also has another incredible advantage: it is easier to follow and makes the pace faster.

I am on the "single thread" team because I love Hamlet, Othello, Don Quixote and the Greek myths.

I like the story that becomes parable and metaphor, imprinting our humanity in a few characters, becoming a symbol of something fantastic, philosophical and metaphysical that affects us all.

Making the single thread choice for a saga is the most difficult, because I will not have the trappings of multiple choice, but I am sure that if the story is good, it will be the winning choice.

In general, I have always been a lover of single lines, and I think if I chose to use multiple lines, it would only reflect my fear of not getting to the point, of not being radical in thought and execution. I don't want to take unnecessary turns, or add what is not needed just to compensate for my fear of not being enough.

I chose:

"The Labyrinth of Hope" will be a psychological saga and thriller in 5 volumes, with a single story line.

I entered the Scuola del Teatro Stabile di Genova in 2001.

I had the good fortune, in the end-of-three-year essay, to play a historical figure who really existed: Évariste Galois, one of the founders of modern mathematics, a rebellious genius who participated in revolutionary movements, barricades, loves and tragedies.

He left too soon, yet in his short life he left an indelible mark on human knowledge.

The author, Luca Viganò, had given the character a tragic tinge, that of the rebellious and misunderstood genius, which contributed to the success of the play.

Playing a character always leaves something to the actor who embodies it. On the one hand, we give our body to the poem; on the other hand, we enrich our soul with that poem, we carry it with us, beyond the play, into life.

Of that character, I carried with me the urgency.

The feeling that life is short and there are so many things to do, too many.

You know me, I never stop. I finish one thing and I'm already doing the next.

Right now, for example, while I'm editing the last volume of The Ring of Saturn -- yep... this is it, it's coming to an end -- I'm already thinking about the second volume of the next saga.

The first draft of the first volume has already gone to beta readers, a test to see if the narrative, characters, placesand events are "level" to tackle a five-volume saga.

I already know that I will rewrite these volumes, because as I write the story the characters will become clearer and clearer, which will force me to rewrite lines, comments and thoughts of each of them.

Incidentally, in a few months I will resume The Ladies' Paradise, and the time available for writing will shrink.

So I need to have a clear and complete map of how to go about writing during the shoot. I need to take care of the pages, and less of the story.

Since I started acting, I never stop.

Why, I don't know.

Maybe because of fear of death.

Because of that line, which Galois used to repeat so often:

"I have no time."

I admit that even now, more than 20 years later, I feel I have no time.

I live as if I don't have much left, hoping to etch time with my soul.

An, all in all, tragic view of my reality, which at the same time drives me to achieve, to do, even at the expense, alas, of health and society.

This thought of wanting to "do," "accomplish" obsesses me to such an extent that I would rather write than go out with friends.

Art is a passion, but also an obsession, which pushes me, moves me and, at times, consumes me.

I am grown up now, so I don't know how much I will be able to mitigate this drive of mine.

When I think back to the past, to when I made Dreaming Quantum Butterflies (© and sooner or later I will put it back on the site), I tell myself that the Flavius who hand-edited 160,000 frames is now a little healthier, solid, stable.

But the fire is always there, and if I don't nurture it, if I don't feed it, the fear of disappearing without having left a mark grows in me.

Who knows if one day I will overcome this desire of mine and doze off under a willow tree, enjoying the present, the sound of the sea and the birds.

Who knows.

As dear Heraclitus says, we see the world in binary mode. There is this or that; light or darkness. Hunger or satiety.

We tend to go by logical exclusion and have built the world using these exclusions to create order: the door, the box. Outside or inside.

In the dimension in which I am moving(publishing), the writer(me) is torn by anambivalence as old as time:

Prestige or commercial success?

Apparently, one excludes the other. Heaven forbid that intellectual salons recognize a work of popular success as having literary merit! And God forbid that a work of sublime prose and theme should sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

No, it can't be; it' s one or the other.

A prime example is literary awards. Strega, for example. I remember a picture showing the number of copies sold of the selected ones. If I remember correctly, of the dozen, only three exceeded 10,000 copies.

So you will understand how present in every writer's heart is the dilemma: commercial success or prestige?

I like to think that one does not exclude the other. Not so much because I dare to imagine a scenario in which a huge commercial success wins the Strega Prize-I am not so deluded-but because, for me, authorial prestige is something you get, if you get it at all, when the work is done.

Prestige is the badge of honor for the soldier who died among the inky trenches. Not the pat on the back of his fellow soldiers.

Prestige is the history books.

Success, on the other hand, as the great Carmelo Bene said, "hasalready happened," lies in a present that is already past.

So I should ask myself: what is commercial success for me?

How many copies? How much profit?

I think commercial success, for an artist, is the moment when, with his art, he is able to be autonomous. To walk on his own.

That means earning enough to say:

"Am I happy? Is that enough for me?"

And answer yourself:

"Yes."

Then, if you overdo it, it's fat, but if I have a hidden quality, it's to be grateful for what I have.

Back to my authorial pathos: commercial success or prestige?

As is often the case, this journal allows me, as I expound my thoughts, to gain clarity. The text is a snapshot of this quest of mine.

And I feel the answer clearly within me:

If I could choose, I would choose commercial success in life, and prestige postmortem.

Now that I have gained clarity on this point, all that remains is to tackle the next stage:

Writer for medium publishing house, large publishing house, or independent writer?

As you know, I act, I have little time. I cannot devote myself to the chores for which an author should invest all his time: meetings, salons, presentations, book signings.

These are all tasks that I can't fulfill as well as I would like.

And so I tell myself that maybe I should go 100% self-published. Become self-published and give up that part of the world and prestige, to devote myself 100% to the website, online books and personal business success.

The advantages would be:

- Total control over publishing

- Higher earnings per copy sold

- Long-term control over works and rights

- Ability to choose the cover and invest in marketing

The other option is to continue with PaV with the next saga(The Labyrinth of Hope, a psychological thriller), in the same manner as The Ring of Saturn.

This seems to have worked. A saying goes:

"A winning team doesn't change."

Who knows. With PaV I have been doing well. Aurora and her team have supported me , helped me and introduced me to the world of literature.

We have a contract that benefits us both and that, if unchanged, gives me a freedom similar to that of a "pure" independent.

The third option would be to try with a big publishing house(Feltrinelli, Mondadori, Nave di Teseo).

A different kind of game.

- Percentages on copies sold would drop dramatically

- Publication time would lengthen

- I would lose control over aspects such as cover, layout, timing, rights, and even the text, which would come under the lens of an EC editor

In return, it would open me up to a larger market, which would guarantee volumes that would compensate for the lower royalties.

But who am I?

Of these three choices, which one best represents me?

I said this in an interview a while back with Antonella on Instagram:

"I am not a specialist in anything. A factotum sui generis."

I leave you, and myself, with a famous English proverb:

"Jack of all trades, master of none. "

(He who can do a little bit of everything is master of nothing)

But few know that the phrase continues:

"...But often times better than a master of one. "

(But often times he is superior than one who is master of one thing.)

In writing The Labyrinth of Hope, one of the themes I deal with is that ofambiguity. If you notice, I deal with it all the time. For example, in The Ring, I tried to remain as balanced as possible about the question, "But does it exist or not?"

Because I had the confidence that the more I could maintain this delicate balance, the more I would capitalize on the story, growing in expectation and emotion.

In contrast to The Ring,ambiguity in The Labyrinth will be central, just aslove is central to the story between Luke and Anna. Ambiguity in all its forms. So I am confronted with whatambiguity is for me, at the level of story, at the psychological level, at the level of words.

Ambiguity is one of the great keys to art, because it carries with it a desire to be understood. The more you can maintainbalance, for example in relation to a character ("But is he good or is he bad?"), the more you will be able to keep the reader company, make him navigate through the character's pains and hopes.

In a sense, this is the work I try to do with Tancredi of Santerasmo. An ambiguous man. Animated by love and envy, fear, pain and fragility.

I like to imagine that all men are like that, ambiguous. Each of us carries multiple sides, some in shadow, some in light. But we are a thousand shades of gray, and depending on the day, the people, we behave in one way rather than another.

"One, none, a hundred thousand," as Pirandello said.

We are ambiguous, we are ambiguous not only with others, but also with ourselves, hiding even from ourselves secrets that we do not want to admit, because the voice inside us tells us they are wrong, or irrelevant.

But most of all, and this is where I count on exploring this topic in depth in The Labyrinth of Hope, we are ambiguous toward reality.

I find this a little human masterpiece. Reality, so concrete, pragmatic, real, is actually a projection inour minds. We are capable of forcing it with our will, writing it down, or even creating it.

Reality itself is ambiguous. Relativity is a prime example. Depending on where you are and how fast you move, time changes. What could be more ambiguous?

Yet we spend ourselves to create order, to put rules and rulers, to refute this ambiguity with all our might.

And the more we try, the more we realize that no matter how big space is or how small a boson is,ambiguity permeates us from top to bottom.

The saga will focus on this very concept, because I can think of no better idea to tackle the paranormal psychological thriller genre.

I have finished the first volume of the five that will complete the story, and I am about to start the second.

It takes guts to tackle a saga. Finish one volume, and you haven't done but 1/5 of the work.

Argh.

Flavius

The author must confront the genre. But why?

Because the genre classifies the story, packages it so that it can be explained more quickly.

- "It's a children'sbook"(The Little Prince).

- "It is a nineteenth-century romance "(Jane Eyre).

- "It is a marine adventure documentary "(Moby Dick).

What a small thing!

But the reductions are actually very useful, because thanks to the categories we can choose our favorite flavor, like ice cream at the ice cream parlor. A menu card.

In the time of the Greeks, we had tragedy and comedy. Now we have smurf flavor.

As a matter of fact, I have been wondering what genre I belong to as a writer.

Those who know me can understand my aversion to labeling. I hate it.

I don't want to belong. It doesn't do it for me. Let alone self-labeling. The worst of the worst.

I'll let you in on this little secret:

when I was a kid in France, I used to say I was Italian, and vice versa in Italy, I used to say I was French.

I am a bastian contrarian at heart. A supporter of the no.

But since I wear a salesman's hat and advertise my books, also confronting the mercantile side of art, I decided to dig, even creatively, into the various genre species, to see which ones I would like to recognize myself in.

No niches.

I like to travel, to vary in my offerings.

I don't write plays. Not even tragedies, at least, not entirely.

I like to think my story has curated my characters, and my readers as well.

The narrative journey must be a walk over hot coals. A rite of passage.

I wish there was a before and an after.

(Mostly for my characters, so also for me living them, but if I'm lucky enough to get my readers to do that too, that would be beautiful.)

And I wish that when the last page of the book is finished, the reader would really be better off.

Better with himself, with the world, with the past, the future.

Better with his fears.

Of the tragedy, I like theintensity, the power, theinevitability.

I like theheight at which he speaks, thebreadth of his voice, the depth of hischaracters.

But of the play, I like the happy ending.

As a reader/viewer, I want to end happier than when I started.

But that doesn't mean laughing; on the contrary.

I want to suffer the pains of the characters, to understand them. I want to see them shine, collapse and rise again, like phoenixes.

I want tragedies with happy endings.

Too bad the category is not there on Amazon. 😂

These days, having finished The Ladies' Paradise, I took the opportunity to catch up with my family, scattered between Italy and France. I went to see my sister. She does an incredible job; she is a nurse. The kind who were on the front lines during Covid, to whom everyone was hymning dances and promises of raises. You can imagine how that turned out, but that's not the point. Talking to her, the subject of artificial intelligence came up. As you know, I have been working on it for more than four years now. My approach is purely artistic, I try to understand its potential, its limitations. She used it to organize her trip:"I want to go there, organize something that's X, Y, Z."And of course ChatGPT organized everything perfectly, like a good assistant. And I said to myself,"Just think, her work, which is in close contact with human beings, is one of the few that doesn't have a real advantage if it's assisted by the implementation of ChatGPT."This means that his field will not be marked so much by the ongoing revolution. This is not a new argument, but it is worth repeating: jobs that require the human touch, which are the jobs of proximity between human beings, will not be in crisis, on the contrary. If I can make a personal prediction, I think that in the next 5-10 years there will be a queue to do these jobs, because they will be better paid and more coveted. In short, the landscape will change markedly. But what about the intellectual jobs? The ones that require knowledge of rules, logic, in short, those things that AI seems to do very well? What will happen to all these jobs that benefit enormously from the input of AI? I think in this case, as Nvidia's CEO says, it won't be AI that steals the jobs, but the people who use it. As if, within a few years, LLMs have become something on a par with computers or electricity. Tools that augment us.It would be easy to think that notionism, knowledge in general, have become a commodity of little value, since everything can be accessed with a click or a chat.But that is not the case.And I will explain why.AI does nothing more than return the most statistically correct answer to your question, using all the available data as a pool of information.Sort of like the Internet in a box.Following this reasoning, what will make a difference in the output is not the AI, but the quality of the question.
It comes back to man as the heart of the intent. Without man, AI remains stationary. It is human intent, the desire for discovery, for transformation, that animates it. And how do you improve an application? How do you make increasingly specific, sharp, deep questions and queries?By studying. By studying like never before.Philosophy, vocabulary, logical reasoning. It all adds up. Only then will AI work for you. and not the other way around

I am completing the very first draft of the first volume of the saga "The Labyrinth Of Hope."

We are talking about a text that is not cohesive, full of errors and jibes. But that's as it should be. First a formless product is regurgitated, which then, with art, wisdom and patience, will be laced with beauty and diamonds.

I am on the ground floor of my building.

I worked out the foundation for six months: I wrote, rewrote and rewrote a thousand times the "story," what I then knew I had to deal with in writing the page.

Every saga, every book, is first of all a story.

A "big" story that can be told outside the pages of the book.

The map, if you will. The pages are the territory in which the writer discovers and draws the details of an imagined world.

I am now at this stage.

And it is an incredible, exciting and difficult stage.

-Incredible, because it is open to amazement. I open a door but I don't know what's behind it.

And I am the one who has to imagine it. It is a direct confrontation with the unknown, a kind of chasing after something that does not exist but that, in the moment we chase after it, is written, is created.

-Exciting, because I find myself reliving pieces of my life, translocated into the guise of the protagonist, or the friend, or a secondary character.

I mirror myself, I cry, I laugh, I experience writing as if it were a surreal, imagined but tangible piece of life.

-difficult, because the coexistence of creativity and structure gives rise to a dilemma that almost smacks of madness.

Let me explain.

I have a story, which has a beginning, a middle and an end, as good old Aristotle would say.

And so far, so good. Easy. I'm in control. Sure, maybe I change one thing rather than another, reshape, invent.

Ideas at this "level" cost little: it's five words more or less.

"He takes the plane and runs away" or "He kisses her, stays and they get married." A few words, an infinite difference.

But then, the moment comes when the story is ready to be destroyed by the characters.

Ah, the characters.

At first they are something ideal, existing precisely in those few words that define the story.

For me, characters are defined by the actions they take in my story.

But then, when I write them, there goes a kind of war between my will (the story) and their will!

Like eels they shell out, they flee from my reins, at least they try.

And I, not to break my bond with them, go along with them.

But sometimes they pull hard, very hard, to a place where they cannot go!

And there begins a difficult process, of compromise between their will and mine.

There, they are there, in the writing.

The saga takes shape.

It will be very different from The Ring of Saturn.

Darker, more occult, faster paced. A labyrinth into which I hope to enter, entertain and, who knows, come out different.

I am completing the very first draft of the first volume of the saga "The Labyrinth Of Hope."

We are talking about a text that is not cohesive, full of errors and jibes. But that's as it should be. First a formless product is regurgitated, which then, with art, wisdom and patience, will be laced with beauty and diamonds.

I am on the ground floor of my building.

I worked out the foundation for six months: I wrote, rewrote and rewrote a thousand times the "story," what I then knew I had to deal with in writing the page.

Every saga, every book, is first of all a story.

A "big" story that can be told outside the pages of the book.

The map, if you will. The pages are the territory in which the writer discovers and draws the details of an imagined world.

I am now at this stage.

And it is an incredible, exciting and difficult stage.

-Incredible, because it is open to amazement. I open a door but I don't know what's behind it.

And I am the one who has to imagine it. It is a direct confrontation with the unknown, a kind of chasing after something that does not exist but that, in the moment we chase after it, is written, is created.

-Exciting, because I find myself reliving pieces of my life, translocated into the guise of the protagonist, or the friend, or a secondary character.

I mirror myself, I cry, I laugh, I experience writing as if it were a surreal, imagined but tangible piece of life.

-difficult, because the coexistence of creativity and structure gives rise to a dilemma that almost smacks of madness.

Let me explain.

I have a story, which has a beginning, a middle and an end, as good old Aristotle would say.

And so far, so good. Easy. I'm in control. Sure, maybe I change one thing rather than another, reshape, invent.

Ideas at this "level" cost little: it's five words more or less.

"He takes the plane and runs away" or "He kisses her, stays and they get married." A few words, an infinite difference.

But then, the moment comes when the story is ready to be destroyed by the characters.

Ah, the characters.

At first they are something ideal, existing precisely in those few words that define the story.

For me, characters are defined by the actions they take in my story.

But then, when I write them, there goes a kind of war between my will (the story) and their will!

Like eels they shell out, flee from my reins, at least they try.

And I, not to break my bond with them, go along with them.

But sometimes they pull hard, very hard, to a place where they cannot go!

And there begins a difficult process, of compromise between their will and mine.

There, they are there, in the writing.

The saga takes shape.

It will be very different from The Ring of Saturn.

Darker, more occult, faster paced. A labyrinth into which I hope to enter, entertain and, who knows, come out different.

.

Someone asked me why Anna covers her breasts in the cover of Volume 4. I take the opportunity to make a thought.

Woman's breasts and not man's... Indeed, there is an inequality, but is it sensible? Why does it exist?

Or rather, upstream of a macho worldview, are there logical reasons why women's breasts are, if you will, taboo? (Especially in American society, which, by the way, commands the guidelines.)

In most Western societies, the female breast has been associated with sexuality, while in many other cultures it is seen primarily as a symbol of motherhood and nurture. This sexualization has led to female breasts being considered a private or forbidden aspect, to be hidden in public.

Religious traditions in many cultures have helped to regulate the female body more restrictively than the male body. For example, in some interpretations of Abrahamic religions(Christianity, Judaism, Islam), the female body has been perceived as a potential "instrument of temptation," and therefore subject to greater control.

Our society has experienced and is experiencing a major sexual revolution. The West, as retrograde as it may seem to some, is nevertheless the place of the vanguard on this issue. This is a hot, political issue, and I don't hang out in such moors. I like fantasy, beauty, stories.

Then, as Giuliana wrote me, I am an artist-manager: I have two hats, the poet's hat and the dealer's hat. So this question, first of all, must be answered with the inopinable concreteness of facts.

The saga is a saga for kids, 14+.

And you will say, "Eh, whatever, with everything they see on TV or the web."

Yes, I'll answer. But they couldn't. They do, but they couldn't. And it's my responsibility as a parent to keep my daughter in check, to dialogue and to understand her, to avoid this kind of behavior. So, "everything they see on TV and the web" is not an argument.

To be even more factual and put on not just the manager's hat, but really the whole suit and tie: Amazon is an American company, and in the United States the female nipple is taboo. Placing it on the book cover would have brought with it the risk of having to redo the cover, losing the launch, and delaying sales. Nothing dramatic, for goodness sake, but it would have been a shame.

So, faced with the choice between being elegant and not showing breasts directly on the cover, and doing so manifesting a creative freedom that was not necessary for me, I preferred the former.

Someday, perhaps even for the next saga, I may be faced with the dilemma again, and this time choose to show it. Because what matters is not the political gesture itself, but how much that choice resonates with the story, with the readers I wish to touch.

It is not ideas that command me, that decide for me. It is me, with my ideas, certainly, but not only. I want to tell stories, I want to do it as richly, imaginatively and simply as possible. My goal is to reach the hearts of most, because in the texts I write I also put a message in them. A profound message, what I call the "guiding idea," which carries universal, human themes. Themes that affect people, because they change a perspective and then years later, they reverberate in politics, made by men, for men.

A message that is revealed only at the end of my stories.

It is said of Shakespeare that even when poorly acted, he is interesting.

I'm thinking about this right now: how the power of a story, a real story, transcends how it is performed.

A good story works even if it is poorly shot, read on the train with yellowed pages or watched on a small cathode-ray television set.

A good story works because it is the skeleton of entertainment.

There can be no suspension of credulity without a good story, believable, strong, filled with transformation and emotion.

That is why I spend so much time structuring my stories.

I define them and build a grid, like iron for concrete.

The story, understood as a structure of events that defines characters, emotions and meanings, is the soul of a book, a movie, a video game.

I have this pizza theory of mine in mind. The evolution from dough to pizza, then to stuffed and baked product, as a work of art might be viewed: first thought out, then produced, stuffed by marketing and delivered to the consumer.

And I tell myself that I've screwed myself.

My theory of pizza is actually the theory of sourdough, which is nothing but a chemical reaction between water, flour and salt.

Which is nothing but life.

The role of the artist is to put life into his works.

To literally give life: that is the responsibility I set for myself.

I had a first wish six months ago: to write the story of a man who found the power to enter people's minds.

A psychoanalyst who could heal by physically entering the minds of those he wanted to help.

An initial theme of fatherhood was present, but it was only the beginning of the quest.

The beginning is a bit like going to discover "what you want to discover."

The search for the search, in a sense.

In these months I have been working on the story: an agglomeration of sentences, maybe thirty.

These thirty sentences are the result of structuring, modeling and transformation, but at a high level.

"No, not in France, in Italy."

Or, "No, not a brother, but a friend."

Everything shifts as in a storm.

But slowly one piece falls on paper. Then another.

And something blurry but real emerges.

He lets it rest so that he can look at it a couple of months later with the eye of one who can say:

"But do you really want to invest all this time in this stuff?"

Or, more optimistically:

"Hm ... yeah, I like it."

And so, between fifty deleted ideas and a couple that survived, we move on to the second draft "of the idea."

Then, draft after draft, in the last month I finished the first "broadly defined outline of my new five-volume saga."

And for the past month or so I have been writing the first few pages.

Generic vomit, blurry too, but slowly I begin to see the characters, get to know them, discover them.

I must admit: few things in life give me so much satisfaction .

.

I wonder what makes me continually consider what I do to be inferior to what it is worth.

Letme explain, I have absolutely no trouble attributing to someone the success they have. In fact, I can come up with arguments that maybe that person had not even imagined. I can be convincing, a lot. I can sell ice to Eskimos when it comes to proving a point.

But only when it's not about me.

When I'm dealing with my own mirror, when I have to ask myself, for example, why it is that almost 60 percent of my sales come from what is called "organic traffic," that is, people who met the book after meeting me, but also people who know nothing about me, or others who have heard about the book(the famous word-of-mouth), that's when my castle of certainty collapses.

No, it cannot be because people like the book.

"It's because I'm not good enough to publicize it with paid channels! Or it's because there's something I don't understand, something buried and hidden that surely explains these sales."

It can't be that something I do sells because people like it.

There, basically that's what I think. And no matter how hard I try to eradicate this idea from myself, to fight against the demon of impostor syndrome, here I am again seeing myself in those guises.

Just think that for years (sometimes I still do now) a part of me used to say that I had made a career as an actor just because I was cute. Never, ever could I even remotely entertain the idea in my brain that I, perhaps, could act! Now this syndrome, at least in the "acting" department, has subsided. But now I understand why! Because the writer's one has turned on.

"Never mind, who do you think you are? Kerouac?"

"It's just a waste of time, you'll never succeed."

I say this to myself because really, I'm fed up with this attitude of mine.

How can I manage to chase this thought away? How can I manage to love myself a little more? To look into my soul with enough tenderness to quiet this agitation that grips me?

Do you know how I do it, I annihilate myself. I run away from myself. That's why I act, direct, write, play chess. To forget myself.

And shipwreck is sweet to me, in this sea.

Some people think that giving up everything is the solution. That maybe you need to relax for a moment, forget not yourself, but the world. But how does one do that? Mine is a hunger for life, for recognition, a desire to exist, to shout my presence, until the tears freeze, until my echo touches the boundaries of the universe. I want to be. Other than not being, dear Hamlet.To be, to be, to be!

The grass is always greener on the neighbor's side -- this applies to the neighbor, but also to the world outside our hearts. It seems greener to us, and do you know why? Because we see it with the eyes of the enthusiasm of those who do not know, of those who dream only of good things, and forget the sweat, toil and work that every endeavor requires. Even the most poetic.

So, elbow grease, perseverance and enthusiasm!

.

The narrator, "the voice," as they say -- the one who tells the story.

It is said that a story is not only the story of the protagonists, but also the relationship between the one who narrates and the one who reads.

For the past few days I have been working on better defining the kind of narrator I want to have in the next saga. Those who have read The Divine Adventure and The Ring of Saturn already know my love for original perspectives.

In The Divine Adventure, the story is told in a third-person limited narrator's perspective in the distant past, by Kato, the antagonist.

InSaturn's Ring, still in progress, I have instead opted for an omniscient third-person narrator in the distant past, not even so much limited to Luke, since from time to time Destiny also hangs out in the souls of Anna, Ronnie, Geppo, Floyd, and the rest of the gang.

I think every story has to have the right narrator. Kind of like the lens in photography. If you are doing a close-up, you have to use a telephoto lens, so that the figure's perspective is not too distorted; but if you are framing architectural places, better to use wide, even wide-angle lenses. Then you can also experiment (such as framing a face with a wide-angle lens, creating a kind of monster), but for a five-volume saga, the choice must be thoughtful and balanced.

This time I don't want to use a character to tell the story; I want to merge completely with the narrative, without creating an external filter. This will take away my ability to philosophize, but it will definitely create more immediacy. And considering that it will be a paranormal psychological thriller, I want to stay as close to my characters as possible.

The classic option would be to use a third-person omniscient narrator in the distant past:

Erik stopped in front of the door. Silence enveloped him, thick as a too-heavy blanket, suffocating him. The door still bore the marks of a life that was no longer there: a paper heart, red marker, worn by time. He tried to breathe, but the air suddenly seemed unreachable.
From the window, the dim moonlight cast silver reflections on the inscription carved into the rough wood: "Lea." Erik clenched his fists, feeling his nails digging into his palms.
He took a step. Just one, but enough to send an icy chill down his spine as his hand rested on the handle.
"No, not now, I can't," he muttered, as his breath caught in his throat.

This option is an evergreen, but it has the "flaw," if you will, of losing immediacy, since the story has "already happened."

The other option, very much in vogue these days, is the narrator limited to the first person present tense:

I stop in front of the door. Silence envelops me, thick, oppressive, like a blanket too heavy. The door still has that mark, that memory of a time that is no more: a paper heart, red marker, worn out by time.
I try to breathe, but the air doesn't seem to reach my lungs.
From the window, the dim moonlight reflects silver glints off the inscription carved into the rough wood: "Lea."
I clench my fists. Nails dig into my palms, but I don't let go.
I take a step forward. Just one, and I can already feel my blood freeze as my hand rests on the handle.
"No, not now, I can't," I whisper, breath ragged and throat burning.

Interesting, but it has a rather huge problem-I'm limited every time by the narrator. I can't tell what's going on in a third party's head except by changing perspective altogether. It becomes very, too limiting for my taste.

So, I went looking through my novels in the bookstore to see if I had anything hybrid. Nothing... So I set out to find an alternative form that could give me the feeling of immediacy of the present, with the flexibility of the third person.

There you have the narrator limited to third-person present tense:

Erik stops in front of the door.
Silence envelops him, thick as a too-heavy blanket, suffocating him.
The door still bears the marks of a life that is no longer there: a paper heart, red marker, worn by time.
He tries to breathe, but the air suddenly seems unreachable to him.
Through the window, the dim moonlight casts silvery reflections on the inscription carved into the rough wood: "Lea."
Erik clenches his fists, feeling his nails digging into his palms.
He takes a step. Just one, but enough to send an icy chill down his spine as his hand rests on the doorknob.
"No, not now, I can't do it," he murmurs, as his breath catches in his throat.

Write in the comments which style you like best.

,

Flavio

Today I wonder who I am. Why do I move seas and mountains to write stories, to the point of risking everything to do so. What drives me to consume time and resources in this endeavor? To become a writer, to be able to get my stories adapted on screen: is this all out of vanity? Or is it an act of generosity, a desire to share? Or perhaps pure selfishness, that of wanting to travel in the imagination in search of those famous pearls, thinking that this journey is worth someone else's time and money. It is a difficult job, that of the storyteller. Like all good work, it deludes you into thinking that the creative process is enough to bring the story to life. Of course, it doesn't. Writing stories is a bit like playing the guitar: it sounds easy, and everyone can strum it. But becoming a story virtuoso, a plot virtuoso, is a difficult art to pin down. Sometimes I wonder if I really am one or if I am simply going out of my way to convince others (and myself) that I am one. I struggle to find a reason, a reason for it all. I think and hope that I am not the only one experiencing this dilemma. In fact, I think this fear extends far beyond the confines of the storytellers. This "misery half a joy" only partially soothes that feeling of fragility that permeates my doing. I often tell myself that "I need to get on with it and not think," and sometimes it works. Sometimes I find myself in a dark place just because I choose to close my eyes. And, in those cases, my willpower gets the better of me. Willpower -- now that I've written more than one story, I feel like I see it as a red thread of my poetics. I have an incredible respect for it, and I think that comes from my absolute desire for independence. This is the theme of Saturn's Ring: how much do we choose our own destiny and how much, on the other hand, are forces beyond our control? The artist is the one who makes his or her own inner quest beauty. Digging through demons to forge diamonds. To do so, there are those who sing, those who play, those who write or build. All linked by this compelling desire for inner search and exploration of the world around. Today I researched the Val di Non, which will be the place where my next saga will take place. Before I physically went there, driven by that desire for discovery that leads me to test and try new things, I took a ride with Apple maps. I put myself there, entered what is called "streetview" and took a "virtual tour" of the various countries that populate it. I tried to perceive the distances, the landscapes. And I tell myself that it is really an incredible time for those who want to tell stories. There is knowledge available that was unthinkable even a decade ago. We have maps upon maps. And as I was doing that, something in me reminded me that "the map is not the territory," and that no matter how hard we try to know something through analysis and study, it is in the living, real process that change, sensation, smell happens. It is when all the senses are calibrated to the experience that the author can truly express something human, filled with a warmth that is personal and unique, and not a mirror of all that others have experienced before him or her. Knowledge shows the way, but it is experience that leads us to our destination. .

What will be my New Year's resolutions?

Why for the "new year"? Why not resolve for "now"? Why not activate on the spot something that I think will improve the quality of my life?

Years stand to time as borders stand to space: imaginary lines that serve to give us a reference, to impose deadlines on us. But I, a human being, a soul in this reality, exist beyond such summary impositions. I am not numbers, not quantifiable in minutes or miles traveled. I am more than the sum of my parts.

I am me, and it is with myself that I must develop a constructive relationship. Not with the impositions that are imposed on me or, worse, that I impose on myself in order to fit into normalcy.

To the question, "What are my New Year's resolutions?", I answer with a shrewd: none. Resolutions I want to think up and implement right away, not wait for the "right time" to decide to act.

I am always in a hurry in life. That's just the way I am, like the white rabbit carrying the ticking clock of life, screaming at me to run, to go fast, to never stop.

Even during these vacations, while taking care of my family, inside me there is nothing but the hunger for success. The pressing desire to do better, to succeed in a new endeavor, regardless of time or space.

A lot has happened this year. I started a five-volume saga that is having a lot of success: I have far exceeded 5,000 copies and am now aiming for 10,000, the initial goal I set for myself. For some people these are science fiction numbers, but for me they are not enough. I know myself: nothing is ever enough for me.

There is a poem I wrote, Chaos, that talks about just that: an insatiable, devouring desire for worlds and innards.

I finished recording the audiobook of the fourth volume. Each audiobook takes many hours of work: about ten for recording and five to six for editing. I do everything. I could delegate, but I don't want to. I want to delegate only when I am sure that the person hired will be paid from the proceeds of the books, not from my own pocket.

Doing it myself allows me to really understand the process, to find ways to improve it, augment it, automate it.

The third volume had had a technical problem and was not available on Audible. Now, finally, almost two months after release, the audiobook is available.

With Antonello we have been working on the cover for the next volume, the fourth and penultimate volume of the saga. I think it is the most beautiful so far, right after the one for the first volume, which I am in love with as Luca is with Anna. Here it is:

I look forward to seeing you in the comments for your hot take on it!

In January I will pick up The Ladies' Paradise for the final "rush" until the end of the month. Then, months of emptiness await me: my real vacation. During that time I intend to complete the saga of The Ring of Saturn and arrive at the Turin Book Fair in the best possible condition to present the last volume.

I am back to giving the journal an intimate, non-teaching dimension. I am tired of teaching: it is not for me. This is a place for intimate sharing, photographs in words of moods, hopes and fears. To get to know me, to get to know each other.

Happy New Year, and .

What differentiates a good actor from a great actor?
This is a question I often ask myself. The answer I have given myself for a long time is this:
"A good actor, while acting, you say 'what a good actor!' while a great actor, while acting, you stay silent, lost in the moment created."

But now this answer is not enough for me. It seems generic, easy.

Acting is a profession I've been in for more than 20 years now -- 20 years between stage, film, TV series. Do you know how I started? With improvisation.

It was improvisation that gave me a taste for acting, for playing. The Italian League of Theatrical Improvisation is where I debuted as a very young actor, while I was attending the State University of Milan, studying computer science (because I wanted to do video games).

And now, whether by chance or fate, I find myself reasoning about the primal quality of a great actor. Or great artist.

Well, I think it is the ability to improvise within a given playing field. I think it is the most fundamental ephemeral quality. This is true not only for an actor, for performers in general, but also for athletes. Athletic gesture is a fusion of great technique and flair. Just like improvisation.

Videos of "virtual actors" generated with artificial intelligence are already being seen online. They will be more and more believable, better and better. They will also get to improvise, but I like to think that the human flair, which captures the moment -- mind you, not the "stage" moment but the real moment, the tangible moment, which belongs to the world of the real -- can never be completely replicated.

Here, I think the artist who can capture the moment of the real will have the doors always open.

This year is coming to an end, another one is opening, and ahead of us we have an uncertain future, full of changes, threats and fears. But let us remember that we are all -- and I mean all -- animated by something magical: a spirit that manifests in us and allows us, when we are crossed by a state of grace, to really listen to reality, to convey emotion, humanity, pathos.

Improvising takes courage. Often directors come to me and say, "Great, do it again just the same!" and I say, "I don't know. But I don't think so." At first they look at me strangely, "What is Flavio saying?" and then I explain myself.

I cannot "remake it the same" because a scene, a work, is the result of an initial afflatus and mutations of the air, of the thought, of the moment. Each time it is different. Each time it is regenerated.

Basically, I think that was exactly what Paganini was saying with his phrase often associated with character dislike, but in my opinion misunderstood:
"Paganini does not repeat."

Today's Diary is different than usual because it revolves around a letter, a very special one.

It is a text written by me, by you, and there is also chance involved, or rather let's call it "Destiny," which we are more familiar with.

You may remember when more or less a month ago (precisely on November 29) I proposed a game to you on social media: I asked you to comment on the video with a number from 1 to 269 with the promise that I would respond with a sentence taken from the corresponding page of"The Ring of Saturn: Volume Three"

The game had started without a purpose, but then reading the concatenated sentences one after the other I sensed a strange alchemy, as if they had taken on a cryptic but real meaning.

And so was born this Letter that in my opinion encapsulates the essence of Christmas, its magic that is made up of sharing and those little things that are able to give an emotion.

I dedicate this letter to you who follow and read me with affection. For all your comments, here, in the journal, on Facebook, Instagram, via email. It is not just an exchange, I am often the first to be enriched by what you write to me.

And so, Merry Christmas wishes and....

PS: here is also the video!

In previous pages I have often talked about how important modus vivendi is.

How we live, what we look at, what we read. Tell me how you live and I will tell you who you are.

As far as I am concerned, at the heart of it all is an openness to what I do not know. Sometimes forced. Then I will tell you. The fact remains that often what drives me to continue a creative process is precisely the curiosity it provokes in me.

The power of being able to go and discover dimensions I do not know fascinates me.

There is a sentence I read that in a nutshell said this:
"There are the things we know we don't know. And then there are the ones we don't know we don't know."

I am addicted to the latter.

When I am lucky enough to find something or someone who "opens a door" for me, that's when I open up to the world. And I lose myself in it.

I love getting lost in what I don't know. The challenge of being able to make these walls of hieroglyphics into something I understand is irresistible.

It happened to me several months ago with marketing. Nothing could be less artistic, yet I am beginning to think that instead it can be the artist's boon.

At least of the independent one.

But how else could the artist be? Can an artist be dependent? I don't think so.

I like to see him as a free, mad horse, who on the wings of his will takes others on a journey that only he could find, invent, create. Precisely because he is free.

Free from the impositions of the market. Free from the choices of others.

So, I said to myself, but why not really study marketing and try to see if I can make my art come alive through it?

A bit like putting handcuffs on your own wrists, you might say to me.

I sin in loneliness, I love freedom more than anything else. I love to get lost, freely, and then find by chance something that is gem.

Hard to do that when someone gives you deadlines.

Someone who maybe doesn't have your artistic vision, doesn't have your values. Someone who looks at the market, at saleability.

But now, and I'm talking to you as an artist here, what if you were the one who was imposing choices on yourself related to the market? To marketability?

Wouldn't those choices be more in line with you?

If you voluntarily chose a path, after analyzing the possibilities and aligning them with your desires, and tried to find a square, wouldn't that compromise be the best of all worlds?

And so I set out to study how book selling, self-publishing, email marketing systems, podcasting, site programming, Javascript, CSS, PHP, HTML works.

I started lining up all the tools I already knew and the ones I needed to learn to try to create a system, a "machine" that would help my stories work.

I cannot say that the machine has been a success so far. But it is also true that I am in my infancy and that, in the short time since I started this adventure ( Divine Adventure is my debut book, released not even a year and a half ago), things are getting better and better.

But it is titanic, monstrous work, like building the bicycle while pedaling.

And not only that: you also have to juggle as soon as you can.

Beautiful things were born, attempts then became something more, but above all I grew.

I feel more complete, richer in experiences, in life.

That's why curiosity is so important. Because it takes us to places that provide us with fatigue, difficulties, but give us back something much more important as a reward for following it: open-mindedness.

Only curiosity can make us know what we don't know we don't know .

Several times I have told you about my pizza technique.

I called it that because it reminds me precisely of the rising of sourdough. In general, you can say that a work of art is like a dish: it has its own recipe, a certain amount of improvisation.

The work of art is itself a story.

And this also applies to stories. Of course, to go digging into all the lights and shadows of the creative process is an abyss into which I don't want to sink today.

So, to keep myself sane, I will tackle my technique: that tangible, limited thing that gives us so much certainty and sometimes prevents us from finding our heart. But it often helps us fly.

For me, it all starts with an intuition, an idea, that is fermented within me. How I did it is a mystery, but it is a mixture of physiology and intellectuality.

It is a passive process, in which the active part is really "how to live": what to read, what to eat, who to hang out with, what to give attention to.

All these things are the fertilizers of our garden, and as every cook knows, a good dish is made of 80 percent good ingredients.

After the fermented idea finally manifests itself within me, in front of me, then a sense of responsibility to that afflatus arises.

Keeping it alive. Making something out of it. Use it. Create it.

And so I hold on to it, but I let it wander inside me still free. I don't write it down, I don't even say it.

I just leave it there. It is too fragile to face the world, better to keep it in the folds of thought.

Slowly, even without my knowledge, it grows, it becomes something tangible, not yet defined, but it begins to be studded with words: tall words.

Old age. Vengeance. Love. Destiny.

At that point I know I have something I must begin to grow and form with my will. Technique. The imposition of will on the idea.

Technique is about taming chaos.

Past the Rubicon, my studies begin to come knocking every day:
"What do you want to say?"
"How do you want to say it?"

I still don't know!" I shout to myself, in vain.

There is nothing to be done, the idea has now mastered its field and is screaming one thing at me:
"Write me! Throw me down somewhere or I'll leave and you'll never see me again!"

So there I write the first sentence, often in a folder called "Story Ideas."

After giving in to the whim of the idea, I wait. Also because, sometimes, there is another idea ready to knock on my door in the meantime.

But then comes that day when I happen to think more about one particular idea.

Just that one right there.

How come it comes back to my mind?

Perhaps because it is necessary to me. Because it speaks to me. Because it is interesting. Yes, it is her.

And here begins a more dimensional phase, in which I decide that I will make a work out of that block of marble.

Now no more fooling around.

You have to get back into the hinges: act one, act two, act three, act four, act five. Triggering event. Character arc. Weaknesses, desires. Who, where, how, when and why.

Answers Which promptly mutate, because the creative act is not finished; rather, it has simply moved to other levels, "higher," if you will.

The important thing is to keep alive the fire that animated this process: that initial idea.

When I succeed, the initial idea becomes like a sentence carved in marble.

Sometimes, that sentence is different from the idea. It can only be that way.

An idea is changeable; it has no form. A sentence is made of words. A sentence is an immutable definition.

But because of that unchanging sentence, I find the strength and discipline to go on to the end.

Trying, with all my might, to make it into beauty, a source of pride and livelihood .

The power of desire.

I came to this thought during my teenage years, in fact, perhaps before. As a child in elementary school, I remember being able to change the taste of water with thought.

Even now I remember a discussion I had with a friend from the elementary school in Viale Zara, Milan - the place where I learned to speak Italian. I used to tell him it was simple: just convince yourself that water tasted like strawberry, and lo and behold it tasted like strawberry!

A magic of my own. Who knows, he might have thought I was crazy....

There is a sentence I read that struck me a few days ago:
"What is the difference between a visionary and a madman? Success."

Let it be so.

Is it possible that success is nothing more than the fruit of our desire, of that irrepressible power that we emanate when our thought attempts to manifest itself to the world?

The power of manifestation.

It will be the central theme of the saga I am preparing. It is cooking, in fact not even. I have the ingredients and have prepared them. I am still thinking about the recipe, but let's say it has been written.

It will be a thriller. Psychological. And paranormal.

So here the manifestation of thought seems to be the perfect glue between these three genres.

What is obsession if not the madness of wanting something that reality denies us?

The inability to accept the hollowness of our power. Psychological, like the mind, like all that dwells within us and guides us, despite our will.

We are the fruit of millions of invisible guides and choices, dictated by every cell of our organism.

We are psyche.

"Psyche." Did you know that is a very special word? Psyche was a goddess in ancient times. She was manifest. She existed.

And then, slowly, we appropriated it. Now psyche is inside us. We have become billions of deserts, each with its own psyche, well placed in the brain.

And then the paranormal. Of course, because after all, isn't this thing that our power is capable of shaping reality from the realm of the paranormal?

My readings later on led me to discover that many had before me thought that the mind was an object capable of shaping creation.

Even Einstein said that:
"Theory determines what we can observe."

Quantum physics is no different, carrying forward the idea of indeterminacy. Reality does not exist until it is observed.

In short, to make a long story short:

Something works if you believe in it, otherwise it doesn't.

It is as if there is an agent within us that tends to fulfill our prophecies, whether they are good or bad.

If we think that all men are traitors, we will tend to surround ourselves with people who can reaffirm the correctness of that theory. Because after all, who doesn't like to be right? Even about something painful?

That is why it is so difficult to break free from our beliefs.

Because we believe them.

If instead we could maintain an equidistant balance, between our beliefs and those of others, who knows what would happen? We would go crazy.

There is a theory that says that this "locking in" on an idea of ours and carrying it through to the end, even if it is incorrect, comes from a social evolutionary trait of humans.

In essence, this "little madness" allows humankind to produce, through thought, a selection of the strongest thoughts, a kind of law of survival of thought.

And who wins? Does the one who believes the most win? Does the one who can prove something win?

But how often is the proven proven wrong? And how often does the belief turn out to be an act of sheer folly?

The working title of this saga, also in five volumes, would be "The Labyrinth of Hope."

Do you like it?

What is a man? What distinguishes us from everything else? Some will say "nothing," we are all on the same level: the plant, the ant, the snake, the chicken, the dog, the man. Life.

Neo-evolutionists say there is only one form of life, DNA, and that everything else is but iterations to improve survival. Different scaffolds that always harbor the same life.

For those who have read me, you know my insatiable desire to dream, to believe in the unknown, in all that is not there. Here, I think humanity resides in this nonexistent space, where the soul is queen and dreams shine.

I am terrified of machines, of artificial intelligence. Yet, I use it daily, I see its potential, especially in terms of organization. Not surprisingly, the French have always called the computer the ordinateur. The ordinator. It makes sense. After all, they are circuits with perfectly right angles, processors with the certainty of 1 and 0, moving without fatigue, without defect. The tractors of humanity. Unstoppable, always improving. It's scary, isn't it?

Yes, it is very scary. In a few years, AIs will be able to produce unlimited, perfect, spot-colored content tailored to each of us. What does that mean? It means that many audiovisual products will not exist except for our eyes and for them alone. Millions of series per month will be produced, and each of them will be worth as much as a seed of rice. Popular culture is in danger of becoming the singular culture. Everyone will be happy with their own production, isolated in a cocoon of illusion, convinced that they have produced art with a simple button: "Look now," "Produce art."

Art is not just an end, but a means. The artistic process is toil, research, knowledge. It is a process defined by imperfection, and also by the knowledge that, at some point, you have to let go. Art and creativity teach the man who exercises it its limits, giving him awareness. Research feeds culture, point of view. Creativity improves us.

But it is not all dark, quite the contrary.

These new tools will give rise to new forms of art, new ways of perceiving the world and reality. Back to the tool dilemma: it is not the tool that makes the artist, but the artist who uses the tools. And I think that will continue to be true.

In this, I feel fortunate to be able to use these new tools, to be able, thanks to them, to learn, study, formulate and order in ways that would have taken much longer before. Because of electricity, because of computers, because of the Internet, I can connect to so many, develop a relationship where I know that you know that I am behind these words.

And I think this is the future of digital art. It will not die; in fact, we are about to enter a golden moment. But it will need this relationship that we have. It will need a bond, between the artist, who is human, and the viewer, who is also human. And it will be the strength of this bond that will give artists the opportunity to express themselves using all the means at their disposal.

It will be our changing imperfection that will save us. We are change, we are life, we are unknown .

What does it mean to make art? What does it mean to express oneself? Why?

There are so many questions I ask myself, existential questions, certainly, but concrete ones. What am I doing here? What is really the point of making art? Maybe I should attend to more useful things. Although by now I'd say it's too late to get a medical degree.

But no.

There is something that drives me, still, to try to be heard, listened to, understood. To try with the power of words, to touch the hearts, minds and souls of those who have the kindness to give me their time.

Do you know what the zeitgeist is? It is the spirit of the times. Yesterday I was reading an interview with Quentin Tarantino who says that the series and movies that are released on streaming platforms (Netflix) do not belong to the zeitgeist. They are like drops in the ocean of culture, in that river of words and data that gushes daily from the engines of humanity, from the machines and hearts of millions of others like me.

I think one of the supreme desires of the artist is precisely to belong to the zeitgeist, to traverse, even for a moment, the spirit of the times.

Mine would be to forge it, to imprint a piece of me in the collective consciousness. It is a big dream, perhaps unattainable in such a fast-paced society, which so easily glosses over or forgets what deep or heartfelt can be written, said, taken up.

Contemporaneity is about speed. Of few-second clips that harken back to popular culture, that have no autonomy, and for the few that do, it is a tautological autonomy. They speak to themselves, about themselves.

For those who know me, all this that I tell can be found in my poems, "Social Networks," "Synchronicity." My poems are an expression of this desire, which sometimes becomes discomfort, that torment of being foreign, alien to the zeitgeist.

Yet, I want to be part of it. I was bullied as a child. They really did. And one of the most painful memories for me is to recall with terrible accuracy the desire that little Flavius had to be accepted by those people who hurt him so much. I don't have the Saturn ring, I can't go back and tell him it's going to be all right. I can, however, look at myself in the mirror, as a 45-year-old man, and wonder how to grow up again.

You may be wondering why the title. Quality or quantity, what does it have to do with the spirit of the times, with art, with the desire to belong?

It has everything to do with it.

The artist must, in every second of his creation, decide the threshold of compromise he is willing to make in order to be part of the world around him. Often, he isolates himself, and secretly hopes that someone will discover him and palm him off into the spotlight. Other times, he abandons the road for less stormy paths; still other times, he finds that balance that allows him to set his mark.

I believe in the theory of evolutionism. And I believe it also applies to works of art. For a work to transcend time, it must have more than one quality: it must represent the spirit of the times, certainly, to expand its reach, to touch as many hearts as possible, but it must also have within it the classicism of themes and a philosophical depth that allows it to remain powerful even after times have changed.

"Write for the living, thinking they will read you dead."

In a connected society such as this, it seems that the imprint can only be left with quantity. Multiply posts, multiply videos, multiply! More is better! But this is not always the case, as I say in "Little Bang": it is only after the zero that what matters is born.

So what should an artist do? Multiply his creations at the expense of originality, or wait and make sure that each individual creation can reach as many people as possible?

It depends. It depends on many things. I see writing, poetry, my books, as the beating heart of my soul. In them there is my whole self, my thoughts, my heart, even my sweat. I cannot multiply what is precious without devaluing its value. So I lean toward the second option: deepen and make each one leave an imprint on the zeitgeist. How do I do that? With marketing, with the use of social networks, even with this Diary, which allows me to approach you in a different way and who knows, intrigue you to read me in something deeper than a blog article.

This journal is a testimony to my journey, a complex cavern of systems and desires, acting, writing, entrepreneurship, in which, slowly, I try to find a square .

Many questions were posed to me for this article, which will be, as you will see, a hybrid form of discussion between us. As you know, I asked you, a few weeks ago, to ask me questions on this topic. Today I wish to both explore this topic from a technical point of view and address your questions.

First of all, it is necessary to understand exactly what a character is. I have my own very personal theory about this: for me, character is a collective hallucination that then manifests itself physically through the power of acting.

When I act, I do not play a character, but I live the lines I am given in the deepest and most realistic of ways, dressed by people who have followed an idea, within sets that paint a world. And all this produces the hallucination I embody: the character.

Starting from this premise, it is easy to understand how I do not believe in characterization, but rather in honesty. For me, good acting is the real lie. The deepest honesty embodied in the illusion of the real. When I'm acting, I'm not pretending, I'm real, as far as I can go. And then, magically, a "Good!" is heard and the illusion ends the time of a breath.

In fact, I am often asked if I find it difficult to get into a character, to which I reply, no, getting in is easy. It is getting out that is difficult, because by dint of wearing a mask, something of that mask stays on you, and you never take it off. You embody the character, and the character seeps into your bones. Of course, dealing with this method takes great control, especially emotional control, because it takes a moment to blur the line between real and fake. But that's how I like to approach the art of acting. With my heart on my sleeve.

For writing, on the other hand, the process is much more complex. A character is the set of actions he takes within the story. The big choices define him. The way he expresses himself, the way he thinks, everything takes shape in words. In a level of abstraction that gives, if well written, the reader the possibility of being that character himself. To experience firsthand, in his own imagination, every aspect of the minds and souls that dot the book.

My writing technique is divided into several stages. I start thinking about a possible story, and slowly I imagine it, as if it were a short story, a few pages, which I then begin to define, to structure, to frame. It's a very creative phase and at the same time very technical: crucial for me to give me the freedom later on to write without thinking. Just like in acting.

When I face the page, the dialogue, I live it as if I were acting, trying precisely to embody, each time, the thought, the desire or the fear of the character, with the awareness of not wasting words and carrying the scene forward.

In this case, acting and improvisation are very useful to me, because they allow me to face this "space" with a greater awareness, a fun that gives me tears, smiles, emotions. Because writing excites me so much: it is when you get to an important scene, during which you are able to put a piece of your heart on the plate, well, that is a great moment for the writer. I dare say that's why it's so good to write. So ... liberating.

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How exactly do you cast yourself in a different character each time when you act?

• Cinzia

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I've been asked this question several times. So ... my process is always the same. I face the moment, the silence, the scene, for what it is. Neither more nor less. My goal, as an actor, is to be in the here and now, and it is by touching that moment that the character is born. My responsibility, as an actor, is to be "real." To make something happen. The rest I leave to others. This allows me to give the viewer that piece of me that is, I think, one of my characteristics.

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Were you inspired by the character of Tancredi, a role you've been carrying for some years, to draw Floyd as Luca's antagonist, a dark character who will most likely have his own development in the next volume?

• Paola

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I admit. Floyd comes from the mask of Tancredi. As I said, it is inevitable that by dint of hanging around with a character as I do, something inside remains. Writing in this gives me a chance, in a way, to sublimate that inner demon (in Tancredi's case it has to be said!) and use it as a narrative tool. That is one of the great fortunes I have as an actor. I have embodied many different men, some dark, some romantic, and this has expanded my panoply of thoughts, of souls.

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To get into character, how do you prepare?

• Silvana

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Having an atypical approach like mine does not, of course, preclude great preparation. Mine consists of two things. 1. Memory. I tend to know my lines very well, I study them almost obsessively, because I want to be able to not think them out, I want to make them something instinctive, like breathing, just so I can give them a naturalness. And 2. I look for the moment. You should know that on set I'm quite a joker: I make jokes, make faces, talk and have fun between takes, and often people who see me on set wonder how I can switch, right after the take, to the seriousness of the character. That bubble of lightness really serves to align me with myself, with those around me, to make me feel the concreteness of the present.

And then ... it flies.

I really hope you enjoy this new format. And in case, we could develop it even more, looking for a more dynamic relationship, where I also draw from you the issues to be addressed. An ongoing dialogue, serving as a witness to our little garden.

Today I decided to share with you the text of my speech in the Senate, with some small notes to confess to you also what my moods and emotions were at that very important moment.

The award focused on "Soft Skills," that is, those skills that are not acquired through school study, but represent the interdisciplinary nature of knowledge acquired in life. Skills, in my case, ranging from fields such as emotional management to creativity to storytelling.

I leave it with you in written form. If you are listening to me from Spotify, this is a good opportunity to drop by flavioparenti.com in the blog section, you can also see the full video of the talk.

!

(My heart was racing and I was afraid I was not up to the task. Before me, many doctors had spoken)

Good evening. I, like many artists, suffer from imposter syndrome, so I feel very excited, but also lucky to be able to listen to you all, because you come from so many different spheres and bring different knowledge that I do not possess. I am 100% soft skills: the artist, by definition, does not have many hard skills. My skills are speaking, for acting, and writing, for writing, which are skills that we all tend to have, but you have to turn them into emotion. This is my soft skill.

(For a short time in my mind I had the idea of improvising and not leaning on the speech I had written, but then I wanted to stick to my initial choice.)

Now, I prepared a little speech for myself, because we are in the Senate anyway and I wanted to pay homage to this moment. First of all, thank you, thank you very much for this award, because I am really amazed to be here. To receive this award in the Senate for me is an immense honor, so first of all I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. This award is not only an accomplishment (I am young), but it is a reminder of the journey that I embarked on so many years ago. It is a journey that I began on the stage in Genoa, that I then continued between the cameras of Cinecittà, and that has now evolved in a way that I could never have imagined.

I am an actor, and so I live the stories on my skin, in the present moment, now, "Hic et Nunc." And every scene, every line for me is an opportunity to connect to the moment, which is something ephemeral, and yet it's so important. And you all live it: you lawyers live it, you doctors live it. The moment, being connected to the moment, that's the art of acting. But it is a soft skill. And maybe one of the most important soft skills, because it's the one that allows you to connect with the human being in front of you.

(I reported the speech as I said it, but you should know that there were improvised parts and written parts. Precisely because of that initial thought, I chose to leave some spaces where, who knows, I might have reinforced or said something different. Where did I improvise, you ask? That will remain a secret...😂)

So, I tell stories, I live stories, but I don't simply stop at acting. I have been lucky enough to do theater, to do movies, as we said, to do series, video games, and each time I have realized how important stories are, because they are the bridge that connects us and reminds us that we are not alone. A story reminds us that we are not alone, that someone else is experiencing the same things that we are experiencing now. And that is the importance of stories. A story is a tale that leads both the one who tells it and the one who hears it into a transforming experience.

I then found in novels the most suitable form for me to bring my creativity to life. Writing, in its purest form, allows me to explore the nuances of reality and, above all, of myself, because making art also means looking at oneself, producing something that is outside oneself and then, like a mirror, hearing its echo and growing through this repetition. In short, I realized that storytelling for me is the engine of my soul. It is the flame that fuels everything I do, whether it is theatrical, film or literary, because creativity ignites the soul. And without creativity, life is poor, no matter what work you do.

(Here I was beginning to feel my voice trembling. I didn't want to go long, I didn't want to bore them. Also, I didn't want to sound like I was "pulling my weight." It's hard when you take an award, not to fall into self-celebration. And just think, this very journal came to my aid. Because writing it not only allowed me to bond with you, but also gave me new tools, as each article is a new world for me, a new discovery that is gradually forging my poetics)

And in that sense, taking an award like this makes me think about how important it is to cultivate these soft skills: storytelling, creativity. What are they? What are they good for? They serve. They serve to connect us, they serve to recognize the other person, they turn into empathy, but not only that, they also turn into the ability to predict what the other person will do, because they are listening, because you sense the humanity in front of you.

So, thank you. Thank you to those who believed in me. I take this opportunity to thank my editor, Aurora Di Giuseppe, and thank you for recognizing this value in me.

(This following, as is obvious, is a topic very dear to me, and I was thrilled to have had the opportunity to be able, precisely, to bring it out in such an important context.)

And I end with something extremely important, which will be at the center of the art debate of the next two decades and which I take the opportunity to put under the lens now. I dedicate this award to all those who, in a world of artificial intelligences that seem poised to replace us, continue to believe in the soul, in the power of human storytelling, inspired and imperfect. For it is always and only our humanity that will restore meaning, connection and hope.

Thank you.

Every artist or creative person knows how important it is to capture ideas as they emerge, because they often slip through your fingers like sand. However, collecting ideas is an art that requires method and discipline. Over the years, I have developed a number of tools and techniques that allow me to order and manage not only creative insights, but also the practical matters of my work. The key lies in finding the right balance between order and creative freedom, between action and reflection.

The tools I use: Microsoft To-Do, Apple Notes and Notepad

To keep track of everything I need to do, I use different platforms. Microsoft To-Do is my main to-do tool. It is organized, clear, and gives me an overview of all the tasks and projects I have going on. Here I put deadlines, priorities, and details on what needs to be done. Apple Notes, on the other hand, is my tool for more immediate ideas, the ones that suddenly come to mind and that I need to jot down quickly, wherever I am. Finally, I also use Notepad on the computer, more like a digital notepad for brainstorming sessions or to better process ideas.

One thing I do not do is use voice notes. Personally, I prefer to write, because putting words on paper or digitally helps me bring order to my thoughts. Writing is a process that allows me to reflect and better organize what is on my mind.

From chaos to topic folders to a new method: Problems and Opportunities

Until recently, I used to organize my ideas into thematic folders, each addressing a specific area: "the video game company," "writing," "the site," and so on. It was a functional method, but I felt something was missing in terms of management and practical action.

Recently, I discovered a new way to structure my note-taking system. I started to divide everything into two major groups: "problems to be solved" and "opportunities." This distinction has transformed my approach. Problems are those issues that need to be addressed in order to move forward, those nagging issues that block progress if they are not resolved. Opportunities, on the other hand, are all those new ideas that could open new horizons or create new possibilities, but which do not always require immediate action.

What I do is focus exclusively on the problems to be solved. These take priority because they represent the real obstacles to my advancement. Opportunities, on the other hand, I let them rest for a few weeks. This is because they are often the ones that excite me the most and cause me to devote so much time and energy to them, but they do not always lead to concrete results. After 2-3 weeks, I reread them with fresh eyes. If, after that time, the opportunity no longer seems so interesting to me, I eliminate it. If, on the other hand, it passes the test of time, then I devote myself to developing it.

I also like to devote myself to what I call "an opportunity day," an entire day in which I immerse myself only in new possibilities, exploring what may come out of ideas I have let rest.

No notes for creative ideas: I let them bubble up in the cauldron

Another feature of my method is that I don't take notes for creative ideas right away. I am inspired by the Socratic philosophy that writing "fixes" ideas, in a sense killing them. When an idea is fixed too early, it runs the risk of losing its vitality, of becoming too static. For this reason, I let ideas bubble up in the cauldron of my mind. In this way, I allow thoughts to mingle, meet, and make those unexpected connections that can lead to true creative explosions.

Only when I begin to have a general vision, when an idea has matured enough, do I start writing something. Even then, however, I don't rush to develop it right away. I let my first notes rest, come back to them after a while, and reevaluate what I have written. Just as I do with opportunities and problems to be solved, I carefully select which ideas to pursue and which to discard. Not everything deserves to be developed, and selection is a crucial process.

The importance of finding your own method

Capturing ideas and insights is an art that requires a method suited to one's needs. My approach is based on a combination of practical tools and a careful selection philosophy. On the one hand, I use technological tools to organize my thoughts. On the other, I let ideas rest in my mind and allow opportunities and problems to mature over time and then evaluate them with a clear mind.

In the end, what matters is being able to find a system that balances the creative impulse with the need for order and structure. Only then can we turn inspiration into concrete action, without losing the magic of the creative process.

The discipline of the artist

Being an artist means constantly living between two opposing forces: creative freedom and rigid discipline. On the one hand, there is the need to range, to explore without limits, to access those ideas that surprise and amaze us. On the other, there is the need to give concrete form to those ideas, to structure the work so that it can be understood, appreciated, and ultimately realized. Over time, I have learned that only by balancing these two elements is it possible to turn creativity into a productive and satisfying craft.

Creative freedom: reaching the "numeno"

Creative freedom is that magical moment when the artist is able to transcend the phenomenal world, to go beyond appearances to reach the "numeno," that place beyond the surface of things where the deepest and purest ideas reside. In that space, almost mystical, lie the ideas that can surprise even ourselves. It is a place where the mind seems to connect directly with the fresh fruit of the tree of reality, picking it directly from its branches.

It is at that moment that we experience the wonder of pure creation, when ideas flow unchecked, unpatterned, and we are so deep into creation that we do not realize that we are simply a channel through which something greater passes. But that freedom, however exhilarating, is only the first step. The pure idea alone is not enough. Like a glowing magma emerging from the depths of the earth, it needs to be cooled, shaped and sculpted in order for it to take shape. And that is where discipline comes in.

Forging the idea: the need for discipline

Just as a blacksmith must strike iron while it is hot to give it shape, (or like Saturn forging his ring, Anna would say inSaturn's Ring) so too must the artist work on the newly born idea, still flexible and malleable. Discipline is the tool that allows structure to be given to that creative magma, preventing it from dissipating into a flash fire. In fact, the idea cools quickly, and without technique and consistency, we risk losing control of it.

Working with discipline means accepting that the moment of pure inspiration is only part of the process. After that initial moment, there is the day-to-day work, the effort of shaping something into something concrete. And that is not always easy. I often find myself acting without creative spark, without enthusiasm. It can happen; life is complex and full of nuance. But it is precisely in those moments that discipline proves crucial. Knowing that I have to be there, that I have to work, allows me to get through even the least inspired moments.

Technique: the bridge between freedom and form

Technique is the means by which we transform the idea-or ourselves-into a tangible work. Whether writing or acting, it is a process of growth that requires patience, but also a deep knowledge of the tools. In my case, storytelling and acting. The art "of the present" and the art "of the Story." Two sides of the same coin.

Technique does not limit my creativity; on the contrary, it brings it out. As I have often said, creative freedom is wonderful, but it is boundless. It is only when we can place it within a defined framework that it can really shine. It is like a sculpture: the raw material is necessary, but without the expert hand of the sculptor, it remains just a block of marble. I know several sculptors; I assure you that it is tiring work, wearing out muscles and skin. Yet this is the only way to achieve excellence.

The balance between chaos and order

In the end, the artist's craft is a continuous dance between the chaos of creation and the order of discipline. Creative freedom draws us to unexpected places, allows us to tap into new and surprising ideas, but it is discipline that transforms those ideas into accomplished works. The real secret is learning to balance these two forces, without allowing one to crush the other.

With creative freedom we explore, with discipline we accomplish. And it is in this delicate balance that my heart lies.

Overcoming writer's block

Writer's block is one of the most frustrating experiences a creative person can have. You sit in front of the paper, or the screen, and the words simply don't come. The fear of the blank page becomes suffocating, while the creative void seems insurmountable. Over the years, I have faced this fear many times, and I have learned that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. However, there are practical strategies that have helped me overcome these stalemates and regain creative flow.

Accepting emptiness: it is part of the creative process

The first thing I realized is that emptiness is not the enemy of creativity. On the contrary, it is part of the process. We often feel stuck because we are terrified of not having anything to say or not living up to our expectations. Accepting emptiness as a natural phase, rather than a failure, was the first step in facing it with serenity.

When I sit in front of the blank page and feel paralyzed, I try to remember that blockage is part of my creative journey. I don't have to fight it, but welcome it. Sometimes, this simple shift in perspective is enough to get the ideas flowing.

Recognizing the fear of perfection

Often writer's block stems from the fear of not being perfect. The idea that what we write must be immediately flawless paralyzes us. I often found myself stopping before I even started, precisely because I wanted the first words to be perfect. But I have learned to give myself permission to make mistakes. Writing is not an act of perfection, but of exploration. Not everything we put on the page has to be good. The first draft is a process of discovery, a way of shaping raw ideas.

This theme of perfection is something I also explored deeply in my book, "The Divine Adventure." The desire for perfection can lead to damnation, and Kato's character pays the extreme consequences of his obsession. The pursuit of an unattainable ideal ends up becoming an unbearable burden. Similarly, in writing, the fear of not being perfect can block us, while true creativity emerges only when we allow ourselves the freedom to make mistakes.

Routines and rituals: the key to unlocking creativity

As I have explored before, routines and rituals play a key role in my creative process. When I find myself stuck, going back to my routine is a powerful tool to break the block. The repetition of gestures, the discipline of sitting at my desk even when I don't feel like it, helps me create a mental space where words can emerge.

One ritual that has particularly helped me in times of block is free writing. I take my notebook and write whatever comes to mind, without judgment. Often, after a few minutes of meaningless writing, I begin to find a common thread that leads me toward new ideas. This technique allows me to get around the mental block and enter a more fluid and creative state.

Changing perspective: the power of walking

Walking is one of my most valuable allies against creative block. There is something about physical movement that frees the mind. When I feel stuck, I leave the house and take a walk. The simple act of walking, observing the world around me, listening to sounds and letting my mind wander, often helps me unlock new ideas.

I am a great believer in the power of walking, not just as exercise, but as a creative practice. Like the Greek thinkers, walking allows me to think without pressure, to let ideas emerge spontaneously. It is a time when I can disconnect from work and at the same time approach it more intuitively.

Breaking the blockage with structure

One of the tools I use to break through the block is technique and structuring. I work with recursive writing, structured on a cycle of five narrative movements that can be isolated to paragraph, scene, chapter, volume, or even saga level. The concept of fragmenting a big problem into a series of small problems allows any blockage to be overcome. A 10-kilometer journey may seem endless, but if we break it into 100 100-meter journeys, it becomes something tangible, achievable. This allows me to tackle ambitious projects without being paralyzed by their vastness.

Remembering the "why"

When everything seems stuck and frustration takes over, I try to remember why I write. Writing is not just a craft, but a calling, an act of love toward the stories I want to tell. Remembering my "why" helps me regain motivation when the block seems insurmountable.

I ask myself, "Why does this story deserve to be told?" "Why did I start this project?" Often, reflecting on these questions reignites the creative spark and pushes me to continue even when the road seems difficult.

Finding a beacon in the night

One of the best strategies for not getting stuck is to have a beacon, a light to follow. That is why it is important to know what the book is about. Have a single sentence that sums it up, a key concept. That sentence becomes your lifeline when you get lost in the darkness of the creative forest. When I feel overwhelmed or confused, I go back to that sentence, that essence of the story, and find direction again. Blockage is nothing more than a detour, but with a clear beacon in front of me, I can always find my way back.

The power of rituals

In the creative life, discipline often seems at odds with inspiration, yet the more my experience as a writer grows, the more I realize how essential it is to build precise habits to fuel the creative process. Today I want to talk to you about the value of rituals, those moments that, repeated day after day, become a compass for the mind and heart, and help me stay on course toward the goal.

Routine as an ally of creativity

There is a romantic idea of creativity that inspiration comes like a sudden flash of lightning, out of nowhere. It does, but inspiration needs the right soil on which to grow. Creativity thrives when it is cultivated daily, through rituals, routines. Discipline, paradoxically, frees the mind and creates the space in which inspiration can flourish.

Many successful writers and artists have recognized the importance of this connection. Murakami, for example, begins each day with an unchanging ritual: he wakes up at dawn, runs, and then writes for several hours. Stephen King has a similarly rigid routine: he writes at the same time every day, regardless of the inspiration of the moment. This made me think about how crucial it is to build a routine that does not depend on mood or circumstances.

In my case, I have many routines.

Walking to awaken mind, heart and soul

One of the central moments of my creative day is walking. I walk a lot, as the Greek thinkers did, convinced that the movement of the body awakens not only the mind but also the heart and soul. There is something powerful about the act of walking: it is a way to physically get away from my desk, but more importantly to free my mind from the thoughts that oppress me. The best insights often come during these moments of movement, when the breath becomes regular and the mind lets go.

After the walk, the pace of the day varies depending on what stage of writing I am in. If I am in the productive phase, when there is a need to grind out words, my best time is in the morning, from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. During these hours, with a fresh mind and energized body, I sit and work without interruption, letting the creative flow take over.

When I am in the idea-seeking phase, however, my creative clock changes completely. The nights become my refuge. From 11 p.m. to 2 a.m., in the silence of the house, I immerse myself in the process of structuring, of reflection, letting ideas emerge from the fertile ground that is created only when everything else in the world is asleep. It is an almost mystical moment, when the mind relaxes and opens to new possibilities.

This routine, however, did not come about overnight. I still remember when I wrote my first novel, "The Ruin of the Soul" (never published), in Paris, at Île Saint-Louis. Every morning, at 10:00 a.m., I would sit in a small café and order an 8 euro American coffee (crazy prices, I know!). The steaming coffee next to me became part of my daily ritual, and there, sitting for two hours, I would try to write. Some days I couldn't put down a single word, while others the ideas flowed effortlessly. But the more I performed that routine, the more I realized that the words flowed out with greater ease. Consistency was the key.

The power of constancy

I remember that during the writing of "The Ruin of the Soul," my first work, constancy was everything. It was exploratory writing, where I had no clear direction, nor did I know where the story would go. Every day I sat at that table in Île Saint-Louis with the hope that the words would surface. Some days I was stuck, others it seemed as if the ideas would spring up on their own, but that routine kept me going, despite the uncertainty.

That experience was different than the writing of my more recent volumes, such as "The Divine Adventure" or "The Ring of Saturn," where I began with a well-defined structure and a clear vision of narrative direction. In those Parisian days, writing was more an act of discovery: a journey into the depths of my mind without a map. Yet even in that uncertainty, the constancy of ritual played a crucial role. The daily discipline of sitting down to write, regardless of the outcome, taught me that true creative progress does not always depend on momentary inspiration, but on perseverance.

This teaching has stayed with me even today. Although my creative process is more structured, I still believe that perseverance is the key to overcoming moments of blockage or low inspiration. Sit down, begin, and the words will eventually come.

The ritual of acting

Besides being a writer, I am first and foremost an actor, and acting, in its own way, is a ritual. When I get on the set, I immerse myself in a precise ritual, made up of gestures, words and movements, which are repeated with every take. But I have learned not to be a victim of the ritual. Acting is not a passive act; it requires a continuous effort of creative freedom. I strive to break and break what are my own ideas, my own patterns, because what counts, in the end, is the observation of reality. No matter how rigid the ritual is, if you cannot see, cannot listen to your surroundings, then you risk losing the very essence of your art.

The real challenge is to find a balance between ritual and action, between discipline and creativity. It is in this balance that you succeed in making art a productive craft. It is not a matter of choosing between rigor and freedom, but of bringing them together, letting ritual guide the hand, while creativity breaks down barriers and opens up new paths.

My first great Acting Teacher, the director of the Stable Theater School, Anna Laura Messeri, passed away today. A strong, rough, direct little woman with the vital energy of a lion and the sagacity of a fox. She had short hair, I met her in my twenties, and like all children before their grandparents, Anna Laura was always a grandmother to me. I never saw her grow old, because I always saw her as old. Yet, her heart was still young, still young. From the drama school she drew life, from the pupils sap to stand up one more time, to shout, again, that the voice did not come, that one did not understand what was being said.

A stage teacher who now speaks through the voices of the hundreds of pupils she educated, many of whom are known to you as they became famous.

One of them is me.

I want to tell you how Anna Laura approached the concept of inspiration. I want to start there, because it is the first memory that came to mind when I asked myself how to begin this page. And it happened on the day she left us.

It cannot be an accident, dear reader.

I was standing on the stage after receiving from the "Mess," as we called it, a paper: an excerpt from A. Hitler's Mein Kampf, which talked about sports. About how youth should be healthy, strong. An excerpt that was outside of Hitler's crazy politics, but contained another, lesser-known side of it.

The goal was to approach this long text as a monologue. To embody it with voice and body. To give it reason. Because yes, when acting, one of the wonders is being able to be someone else, someone we do not know, whose ideas we do not share, but who, the moment we embody him, becomes part of us. The actor is a thousand men, a thousand faces, a thousand sides of a thousand thoughts. Acting, just like reading, enriches.

Acting is reading with the body.

It was my turn. The rehearsal stage was that of the Teatro della Corte in Genoa. A parade ground of two thousand spectators, a black, huge stage, a San Siro of theaters. Empty.

Only the Mess, seated, waiting to shear off the next pupil with a sage comment.

It was my turn.

I entered the stage, the damp paper in my hand, on which the monologue was printed. I had memorized it, but I was still uncertain; I had to hold it in my hand, to make sure that, in case of a memory lapse, I could rely on it.

I arrive on stage and take my time. I think that's a first sign of acting awareness. You can't start something interesting without preparing it with silence.

And so, I wait. I enjoy my moment. The stage. "It's not bad, then, this theater," I think.

Another second passes and the voice of Mess pops up from the depths of the stalls, addressing that young Frenchman in a shirt and jeans, ready to decant madness.

"Eeeeee...what are you doing? Are you waiting for inspiration?!"

Inspiration. In fact, that was exactly what I was doing. I was waiting for inspiration, the courage to begin. The choice to leave the crucible in which I was lulling myself, like an undeserving squatter, of theatrical silence.

"Oh yes, Mess, I must get off to a good start!"

"You don't have to get off to a good start. You just have to get off to a good start!"

This is, in sum, what I think inspiration is. Inspiration, in its deepest form, is preparation for the unknown.

The work is unknown. No one can know what the work of art will look like in its finished form, because the process of creation is itself the art. It is organic, reflecting the soul of the moment, but also the whole that is the artist.

Inspiration comes from "in-spiratio," inhale. Inspiration is the moment when one lifts oneself off the ground, sublimates oneself into a vacuum tense to leave oneself in the hands of the unknown. The moment when you let the air in to then perform, scream, cry, laugh, destroy and create.

So, reasoning about it, dear Anna Laura, you had grasped my talent, the inspiration, and immediately told me how to bring it forth. By executing. By learning the technique. And taking that step forward.

And every day since that day, a step forward has been taken. And a thousand more I will take, Mess.

.

My first great Acting Teacher, the director of the Stable Theater School, Anna Laura Messeri, passed away today. A strong, rough, direct little woman with the vital energy of a lion and the sagacity of a fox. She had short hair, I met her in my twenties, and like all children before their grandparents, Anna Laura was always a grandmother to me. I never saw her grow old, because I always saw her as old. Yet, her heart was still young, still young. From the drama school she drew life, from the pupils sap to stand up one more time, to shout, again, that the voice did not come, that one did not understand what was being said.

A stage teacher who now speaks through the voices of the hundreds of pupils she educated, many of whom are known to you as they became famous.

One of them is me.

I want to tell you how Anna Laura approached the concept of inspiration. I want to start there, because it is the first memory that came to mind when I asked myself how to begin this page. And it happened on the day she left us.

It cannot be an accident, dear reader.

I was standing on the stage after receiving from the "Mess," as we called it, a paper: an excerpt from A. Hitler's Mein Kampf, which talked about sports. About how youth should be healthy, strong. An excerpt that was outside of Hitler's crazy politics, but contained another, lesser-known side of it.

The goal was to approach this long text as a monologue. To embody it with voice and body. To give it reason. Because yes, when acting, one of the wonders is being able to be someone else, someone we do not know, whose ideas we do not share, but who, the moment we embody him, becomes part of us. The actor is a thousand men, a thousand faces, a thousand sides of a thousand thoughts. Acting, just like reading, enriches.

Acting is reading with the body.

It was my turn. The rehearsal stage was that of the Teatro della Corte in Genoa. A parade ground of two thousand spectators, a black, huge stage, a San Siro of theaters. Empty.

Only the Mess, seated, waiting to shear off the next pupil with a sage comment.

It was my turn.

I entered the stage, the damp paper in my hand, on which the monologue was printed. I had memorized it, but I was still uncertain; I had to hold it in my hand, to make sure that, in case of a memory lapse, I could rely on it.

I arrive on stage and take my time. I think that's a first sign of acting awareness. You can't start something interesting without preparing it with silence.

And so, I wait. I enjoy my moment. The stage. "It's not bad, then, this theater," I think.

Another second passes and the voice of Mess pops up from the depths of the stalls, addressing that young Frenchman in a shirt and jeans, ready to decant madness.

"Eeeeee...what are you doing? Are you waiting for inspiration?!"

Inspiration. In fact, that was exactly what I was doing. I was waiting for inspiration, the courage to begin. The choice to leave the crucible in which I was lulling myself, like an undeserving squatter, of theatrical silence.

"Oh yes, Mess, I must get off to a good start!"

"You don't have to get off to a good start. You just have to get off to a good start!"

This is, in sum, what I think inspiration is. Inspiration, in its deepest form, is preparation for the unknown.

The work is unknown. No one can know what the work of art will look like in its finished form, because the process of creation is itself the art. It is organic, reflecting the soul of the moment, but also the whole that is the artist.

Inspiration comes from "in-spiratio," inhale. Inspiration is the moment when one lifts oneself off the ground, sublimates oneself into a vacuum tense to leave oneself in the hands of the unknown. The moment when you let the air in to then perform, scream, cry, laugh, destroy and create.

So, reasoning about it, dear Anna Laura, you had grasped my talent, the inspiration, and immediately told me how to bring it forth. By executing. By learning the technique. And taking that step forward.

And every day since that day, a step forward has been taken. And a thousand more I will take, Mess.

When I was little, my mom used to make me play a free association game. It worked like this, "Think of a word and say it, the first one that comes to your mind." The other player, after hearing the word, had to say the first word that came to his mind, connected to the one he had just said. It is a free-association game, in which, thanks to instinct and vocabulary, you can align concepts that, if over-reasoned, would never end up together. It is a great way to fluidize the imagination and develop what is called "lateral thinking."

Lateral thinking is that form of thinking that allows one to use knowledge normally associated with a particular field of knowledge, in another field. Revolutionary ideas are often the daughters of lateral thinking. Even inventions are. Observation of the world is the first spark of creativity, and it is also the most inexhaustible.

But fluidity of thought is not enough to generate something truly new. Study is also needed. Let's take the example of the game I played as a child: what did you think was the useful tool to improve the game? The dictionary. The more players knew difficult words, the more the game rose to interesting heights.

In fact, just think of the two players. Imagine having Plato and Kant playing this game, or Baudelaire and Dante, that would be interesting.

Dante: "Inferno."
Baudelaire: "Spleen"
Dante: "Curse."
Baudelaire: "Fleurs"
Dante: "Love"
Baudelaire: "Desire"
Dante: "Beatrice"
Baudelaire: "Vampire"
Dante: "Lust"
Baudelaire: "Decadence"
Dante: "Purification"
Baudelaire: "Abysses"
Dante: "Redemption"
Baudelaire: "Boredom"
Dante: "Eternity"
Baudelaire: "Shadow"
Dante: "Light."

In short, there would be dialogues to imagine! This exercise really helped me to give flexibility to my thinking. I think it is also because of this that I was able to apply creative thinking (specifically storytelling) to many other aspects of my life.

For example, when I founded Untold Games, a video game company, with five friends in 2014, I used all the acting techniques I had at my disposal to sell the game at trade shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Not only that, coming from a "classical" world like theater and literature also gave me an advantage in storytelling, both inherent in the story of our first video game and in telling our story as a development team.

There is no useless knowledge for creativity if we keep an open and fluid perspective, just like those words. The most innovative start-ups in recent years are often connected to fields such as agriculture, which has been sidelined for years, considered not very "modern."

Each of us is a treasure trove of knowledge, a chest full of pearls of life just waiting to be strung on a necklace. This is why it is often suggested to the creative person to "start with what he knows," not so much for an egotistical fact of telling himself, but to start with precisely those characteristics that will make his invention unique.

As Carmelo Bene said, and I will never stop quoting him, "Be your own masterpieces." Because at the end of it all, the real added value is not the idea, it is not even the realization, but it is the person who embodies these two aspects.

Another way to stimulate our creativity is to make empty and go to a place unknown to us. Rely on what I call, in the divine adventure, "the instinct of matter." We are made, like everything, of matter. And this matter has an intelligence of its own. Not only that, each of us has a unique intelligence sewn into us, and sometimes, whether out of fear or fate, we bury our matter instinct behind a social construct, distancing ourselves from what is our demon, understood as an inner animal, a fellow protector (daímōn, from the Greek).

By forcing ourselves to move into unknown territory, we stimulate something everyone is afraid of: crisis. Crisis, for the creative, is gasoline. Crisis ignites the demon in us, and if we have prepared ourselves well (in essence, if we have read the vocabulary properly and learned, almost at a muscular level, new "words") then in that moment of crisis we will shine with a rare intensity, because, with our backs against the wall, the well-trained creative gives his best.

1. Training lateral thinking
2. Enrich technique
3. Go out and play in the real arena: that of our crisis.

Here are the three basic steps to creating together with our soul .