All good artists make the world around us seem more complex, interesting and enigmatic than it usually appears”, writes Martin Gayford in A bigger message, conversations with David Hockney. This talk will focus on what I have learned from my own practice after completing three novels and writing a fourth. And what I have learned from science, visual and performing arts, history and others. How does fast and slow thinking work in writing and how does it influence the process? What does it mean to think about yourself from the perspective of the “death of the author”? How to reach the emancipated reader (Jacques Ranciere’s “emancipated spectator”) through the dialectic of presence and alienation. What Bertolt Brecht and Viktor Shklovsky thought about alienation and critical thinking? Why Lucien Freud is called also a novelist (by art critic Martin Gayford) although he never wrote a novel, but painted portraits? Why the “new look”, new perspective and the (new) distribution of space and time matters. In my talk I will also look at the problem of language: the empty space – which is never entirely empty – a text enters. How to enter those occupied territories of the language, how “black squares” is handled by language. Can one recuperate words? And finally, why is it that storytelling (instead of interpretation of stories) still matters? Or at least have fans.