autobiography

So now I've got a synopsis for the novel Comfort for Engineers. Although the main character is called Ferdinand te Drukker, it is actually a novel about myself, about Rik Almekinders. Still I want the novel to be a story of universal truth. And now I think I should change the details of my own (Rik Almekinders's) life for the benefit of the universal truth and, of course, because I am not fully accepting myself as a typical engineer. I tend to think that for the sake of comfort, Ferdinand should be in his late twenties right now (in 2012) and for the sake of universal truth Ferdinand should be a middleclass boy instead of a man of owning class background.

I teach a group of students what I know about creativity. Those students will be engineers, within four years. When I started to teach them, I thought they were typically middleclass and even working class boys. But I was wrong. When they started telling, I found out that most of them were raised in an upper middleclass or owning class ambiance.

And of course there is fear. Writing just an autobiography seems to be so vain. And an honest autobiography might hurt other peoples feelings. This is an interesting paradox: I'd like to tell an honest story, but I am afraid of hurting other people's feelings. Sigh, ...