With over 250,000 copies sold of her novel Het Smelt (dt. Und es schmilzt), translations into 16 languages, and a film adaptation of her debut novel in 2023, Lize Spit is one of Belgium’s great literary success stories. As Samuel Fischer visiting professor, she spent the summer term at the Peter Szondi Institute at Freie Universität Berlin with a broken ankle and, for the first time in her life, without an idea for a new book. In conversation, the Flemish author talks about the feeling her novels always begin with and why suspense is, above all, a friendly power play for her. Nori Holst conducted an in-depth interview with her.

I meet Lize Spit in her office in the Rostlaube. I am greeted by a classic FU interior: dark carpeted flooring, colourful doors, white-grey walls with posters, and a small seating area with black leather armchairs and a glass table. Through a small window, light from one of the courtyards falls onto the white desktop at which she has taken a seat. Her long, light-red hair is gathered in a loose bun. After the final session of her seminar, “Tell, Don’t Show?! Literature in the Audiovisual Era”, we speak about her writing and her time at FU.

Furios: This summer term, you’re the Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor at the Peter Szondi Institute at the FU. How do you like our campus and the FU in general? 

Lize Spit: »I’m not used to the context of a university because I didn’t study at a university myself. But I really like this university. I was afraid to teach here because I had the idea that I wouldn’t be good enough as a teacher. I have taught a lot in Belgium, but I had the idea that it would be harder teaching at a real university. But the students helped me a lot. Everyone was so generous and gave so much back. There were some quieter students, but also students who really stood up and shared their insights.

I like the atmosphere of this campus, it feels a little bit as if you’re leaving on holiday. It feels like you’re walking through an airport, you know? Because you have these long hallways, this colour scheme and this ceiling.

But then being in the Peter Szondi Institute, you have the coloured doors and this little hallway. It feels a bit like a little village where I have my own office and my place. On the first day, I took pictures of every route. I was afraid of getting lost because I heard that some of the previous Samuel Fischer guest professors got lost all the time. So, I didn’t want to bother my colleagues by calling to ask them to come and pick me up somewhere. It’s a bit of a labyrinth.«

Furios: What is a typical day like for Lize Spit at the FU?

»I had my teaching on Wednesdays. During the week, I would start reading the book that we’d discuss. Then, in the evening before class, I would watch the movie. My class would start at 12:15. In the morning, I’d wake up early and start reading what other people had written about this adaptation, so I could bring in some other people’s opinions. And I’d just refresh the book and the film a little in my head. I would always come to class a bit nervous about teaching, because I had the idea, okay, now I have to fill nearly two hours and questioned whether I could make it. Will the students be interested? Will it work? Will I have interesting things to say?

Afterwards, I always felt really relieved. Then I’d take the rest of the day just to do some things for myself, work on other projects, or watch a film that I really wanted to watch without having to analyse it. Wednesday evenings were always the free evenings because I didn’t have to prepare for the next week yet.«

Furios: Were you able to explore Berlin a little and get a feeling for the city, even though you injured your ankle at the beginning?

»I had this idea that I would be here for four months and really discover Berlin. That I’d teach and read a lot of books. But I broke my ankle the week before I came here, so it was all a bit bizarre in the beginning. I had to travel back and forth every week just to be able to go to the doctor’s in Belgium. I wasn’t capable of doing a lot, so that’s why I wanted to be home and not here. Sitting in my Berlin apartment with my leg in the sky was not really appealing to me.

I’m a house-keeping bird, so I never really went out. I did go out to eat with friends sometimes, but mostly because I always had visitors from Belgium, I’d cook something for them and stay in. It was a very quiet time. But yes – I like Berlin a lot. I think it’s the better version of Brussels. It’s bigger, it’s greener, it’s cleaner.«

Furios: It’s cleaner? Never heard that about Berlin.

»But it is! Brussels is the more chaotic version of Berlin. I think it’s also some kind of tourist thing, like the chaos in Berlin – you see all these stickers and graffiti, and there are neighbourhoods that have just become a touristy thing, that aren’t real anymore. But there are also neighbourhoods I visited where you can feel it’s not gentrified. The Rheingauviertel, the neighbourhood where my apartment is, at the Rüdesheimer Platz, is a really rich, green neighbourhood with a lot of nice houses. It took me an hour to get to Kreuzberg – if you took the metro for an hour in Brussels, you’d be out of Brussels.

I don’t want to go back to Brussels because I live in a neighbourhood there that’s in a really bad condition. Here in Berlin, there are also a lot of homeless people, but it’s not the same as in Belgium. In Brussels, in a city of one million people, 100,000 people have no papers, they’re illegal immigrants. That’s like one in ten. Many have to be invisible and still survive. You feel it in the city – it makes everything a bit chaotic. There’s also a lot of crack addiction in Brussels, because people don’t have much perspective. I don’t feel this amount of despair in Berlin. I didn’t feel unsafe – it was a bit rough here and there, but still, it was really nice. If I could just take my friends and my flat and put it here, I would prefer to live in Berlin.

Another observation I made: If you live somewhere temporarily, you might not experience it the same way as if you lived here longer. People are really friendly here, when I was in my wheelchair, everyone was really open. It’s an anonymous city, but people are open to meeting each other and talking a little with strangers, and I like that. There are a lot of people in the Underground reading books, that’s special, and a lot of people carrying flowers, and not so many people carrying groceries on public transport – as if everyone has a shop nearby. In Brussels, you see a lot of people carrying things like groceries on transport.«

»Making a movie out of a book is like making a translation into another language.«

Furios: You are a very successful book author, but you also write screenplays and went to film school. What can literature achieve for you that film cannot?  

»I think the most important thing is that you can write down the thoughts of your characters. It’s like a shortcut to being able to empathise with them because you know their feelings and you know what they’re secretly thinking. The fact that you can be inside someone’s head is so intimate, and it’s something you can’t achieve in movie making. The camera is always outside the character. You can be very close to it, or use a handheld camera, but you never get into someone’s head. If you read literature, you can become the other person, and in movies, you observe the other person. That’s the biggest difference. 

Making a movie out of a book is like making a translation into another language. You lose things, that’s for sure, but you can also add things. But mostly you lose. I think there aren’t many movies that are better than the books for that reason. But also because you invest less in a movie. With a movie, you usually stick to somewhere between one and a half and three hours, but with a book, you spend so many more hours. When you start reading a book, you already know you’re going to invest a lot of time in it. So, it gets closer to you. 

A movie can really grip you, but then it leaves you after a few hours, and you’re back in your life again. A book really travels with you. That’s the biggest difference for me. It gives more back because you give more of your time.«

Furios: Is there a specific thing that you like more about films than about literature? 

»Movies can use other metaphors. I like the symbolic and metaphorical language of movies. It’s totally different from literature. You have to start from scratch if you make a movie adaptation, to find the metaphors and everything. You can’t just take the metaphors from the book and use them in the symbolism of the movie.

I’d say the one thing films can do that literature cannot is to use a soundscape. You can do so much with that, like creating tension without even using images. I don’t think we can do this in literature. You can create an atmosphere by describing things, or by choosing a setting or dialogue, but still, we don’t have that extra layer. Nowadays, sometimes writers add a Spotify playlist for a book, so you can have a soundscape. But I think literature isn’t meant to have a soundscape.

Music gives us that extra push to empathise with the feelings of the characters. You need it in films because you’re always outside their bodies. I have film soundtracks that I’ve listened to a hundred times, just to stay with the character of the film because I loved it so much, or it touched me so much, or it made me feel something. For example, Hans Zimmer made one of the best soundtracks ever for Interstellar. The suspense of those sequences is so good. They’re on a planet where every second means weeks in their own lives, and the longer they’re there, the more they lose their time on Earth with their children – and then there’s this soundtrack with this ticking clock. It’s so well done, it has very good pacing.«

Furios: You said it yourself – suspense.  You use it quite a lot in your own work, and very consistently. Are there any rules you follow, or habits in your writing process, that create this suspense?

»Suspense building is embedded in our social interactions because suspense has something to do with keeping the other one interested in you. It’s about trying to understand what interests other people. But it changes over the years as well because we get used to other attention spans. If you read aloud, you can sometimes feel that the audience’s attention is lost – it can be because of a curtain flapping in the wind, or because it’s too long, or because someone is making noises.

Also, when you write, you have to be able to be in the scene, or in the chapter, and feel it with your own heart, or your gut. It’s a little bit the same as taking up space in a conversation. Sometimes, if you’re with friends, you can have the feeling that you’re talking too much, and then you know you have to be quiet a bit because you’re taking up too much space. 

It’s the same with suspense: When you’re writing, you feel how much space you’re taking, and that you also have to give something back. If you take attention and want people to listen to your story, you also have to listen to them. But as a writer, you can’t listen to the others because they don’t have a voice, but you can give them something back. So you take and you give, you take and you give. It’s like a tide going up and down, and it’s a gut feeling – now I’m taking too much of their attention, now I’ll give them a little reward for it.

That’s how suspense works. You install information, and then, at the moment you think you’ve kept them waiting long enough, you give a bit back, and then you start again. But you have to be aware of what information they want from you, and that you’re withholding it a little. It’s not only information, it’s also just the atmosphere, giving the sense that something’s going to happen, and then you wait before making it happen. It’s a friendly power play, I think.«

Furios: I really felt that play when I read the first chapters of your book Het Smelt. I remember there was a situation with the father, and I got this gut feeling that something horrible was going to happen, but I didn’t really know what it was, and I started to wait for something. In your writing, you tackle a lot of dark themes that, to me, feel very true to life. How do you decide which theme to focus on in a particular piece?

»It’s always something I want to research. Sometimes it’s something I know from life, and I’ve observed it from close by, and then I think, okay, now I’ll start writing about it. A lot of the topics I write about are very real. I’d say I’m a bit of a naturalist. I want to give a clear and realistic view, but it’s also about exploring the dark side of being human. I think I write about cases where things don’t go well, the flip side of the coin. There are so many human conditions people can suffer from, and for me, it’s always nice to put the spotlight on one condition – it can be egoism, it can be uncertainty or manic depression. I like writing about humans, that’s the core business. In my writing, I try to understand other people, and try to come back to understanding them: the bugs in their system, where they come from, how they emerge, how they work. And then I try to make a story around it. So yeah, the themes are just things that cross my path in life. Then I start studying them and then there is a story that comes with it.« 

Furios: Do you always have the theme right from the beginning, or is it something that emerges during the process?

»I think it comes in the process, but the book always starts with me feeling sorry for someone. I feel sorry for my sister because of her disorder – let’s try to write about it. I feel sorry for my mum because she’s dying, I will write about her. I feel sorry for my partner because he has manic depression, I want to write about that. It always starts with empathy. I’m feeling sorry, and then, trying to find the language for it, and then the whole story follows. But a theme and a story are not the same thing, they start to grow next to each other, I think.«

»As a person, I don’t like conflict, I never have conflict with people in my life.« 

Furios: You are very open about the fact that you write about people in your life and parts of your life. How do you decide what makes it into your writing and what doesn’t? Is there anything you’ve learned about that on your way to becoming this kind of writer?

»Yeah, over the last ten years, I’ve used my writing to address some things I couldn’t talk about in real life. In my last book, Autobiography of My Body, I write about how there was a lot of silence in my family, that we weren’t honest with each other, and it was all built on lies. For me, writing is being honest, and not trying to avoid conflict.

As a person, I don’t like conflict, I never have conflict with people in my life. If a bus driver is angry with me, I’ll be sad about it for days because I don’t like the idea.

But in writing, I’m more courageous than I am as a person. The writer always wants to get everything out, wants to really shovel everything in and mix it up and create chaos. That is who I am. This split yin-yang version of a person and a writer. And yes, they fight with each other a lot because I don’t want to write about the people I love, but the writer likes to write about them. Because the interesting thing about the people you love is that you know all their secrets, all their difficulties, all the things that make them human.

It’s often a battle inside me, and the writer has won a lot. Now, after ten years of writing, four books in, I’m changing a little. Now, I have written down most of the things that we could not talk about when my parents were still around, and now, I don’t want to use that anymore. Still, I’m sure that if I write a completely fictional book, I will also use autobiographical parts in it because you always write about things that you know. It is a mixture of inventions, fantasy and reality.«

Furios: Is there something about your writing process that you find funny yourself? 

»Oh, yes. If I’m writing, I can’t start in the middle of a page. If I stop one day, I can’t just leave what’s already on the page and go on writing new stuff the next day. I always have to rewrite everything that comes before it. The first chapters of my books are rewritten a thousand times because whenever I open a document, the first thing I have to do is read everything that’s there, and only then can I start writing again. Not from the beginning of the book, but from the beginning of the chapter. The last sentence is the only one I only do once. I don’t know if you can see, while reading my chapters, that in the beginning it’s much more refined than towards the end.

It’s a way of keeping the house clean. I need to check the text, see if everything is clean, and then I can continue writing. If there is something that is not good yet on the page, I can’t permit myself to start making new things. I first have to clean up the mess that I made, and then I can go along. That’s bizarre, and it’s not efficient. It’s also good to breathe in what you have done, just to be able to breathe out a little bit of the new air to see what you are doing.

I have revisited some of the sentences, I’m not exaggerating, a hundred times, maybe more.«

Furios: Can you think of the sentence you’ve reread or rewritten the most times?

»Hmm, not really. But there is one metaphor in my latest book about my father. When my mother got cancer, an incurable cancer, she split up with my father, and he really wanted the world to know that he wasn’t the one divorcing her. He didn’t want to be seen as someone leaving a sick woman behind. I compare it to a cook wanting to fire the kitchen chef over a tiny fish bone in the soup right after the ship has already sunk. Why would you fire your cook over something that small when everyone around you is already drowning?

And that’s the comparison with my father. This image was something else before. I looked for a long time to write it in a funny way because I use a lot of metaphors to make the text a bit lighter and funnier. I had different versions, different images, but if I tried too hard, in the end I’d just drop it because a metaphor has to come directly. You can’t squeeze too much because it doesn’t work then. That was the only time I really squeezed, and I didn’t erase it, and thought, yeah, that’s actually a good one.«

Furios: Can you tell what you’re currently working on, or what your next projects will be? Is there something we can look forward to?

»I’m writing this biopic about Vaya Con Dios. That’s the big thing in the second half of the year. I’m doing it as an assignment, it’s not something I always dreamed of doing, but it’s also because I didn’t have any idea for a new novel for two years, so I thought, yeah, I need to earn some money. They asked me if I wanted to join their team, and I said yes. I’m also starting work on a graphic novel together with a very talented graphic novelist. I’ll be doing the writing. At the end of the summer, we’ll try to put together a storyboard for it. So those are the two visual projects.

It’s slowly starting to form in my head, the idea of a new book for myself, but it’s different because I’ve never had this period where I didn’t yet know what I wanted to write. This is really the first time in my life that I’m facing an empty page. I do want to write something fictional, and I already know what it’ll be about. I’m starting to read a lot about the nineties, about a big case, and how it shaped our communities and our countries. It’s not that I want to write about the person at the centre of that case specifically, but I want to use it as a setting for a story: the nineties, with this shifting sense of anxiety, and how this anxiety shaped our intimacy. But it’s starting slowly. I don’t have the story yet, I just have the setting.«