I Didn't Expect to Fall in Love Again

On Sunday afternoon at the Castlefest fantasy festival, I made a last-minute decision.

I’d already spent the previous day interviewing authors for my new Dutch podcast, Fantasyfans.nl. Instead of recording more conversations, I decided to spend the rest of the festival making a short documentary.

There was no camera crew, no script and no elaborate equipment. Just my iPhone and a rough idea of the story I wanted to tell. I wandered through the castle grounds, talking to visitors about the stories behind their costumes, interviewing artists and following whatever caught my attention.

By the time I boarded the train home, I couldn’t stop smiling.

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An Old Craft

It took me a while to understand why.

Long before writing became such a big part of my life, I spent seventeen years making television documentaries. I eventually learned to do almost everything myself, from finding stories and conducting interviews to filming and editing.

The first documentary I ever made was awful.

I made every mistake a beginner could make. After spending the better part of a week trying to rescue the edit, I finally asked one of our experienced editors to have a look. He watched the footage for a few minutes, suggested a different structure and suddenly everything fell into place. It wasn’t that I had filmed the wrong material. I simply didn’t yet know how to shape it into a story.

That afternoon at Castlefest brought all of that back.

As soon as I started filming, it felt familiar. I instinctively knew who to approach, which questions to ask and how to collect the pieces I’d need later in the editing room. It reminded me that seventeen years of practice don’t simply disappear because you spend a few years doing other things.