Alternate:Words

Wel­come to Alternate:Words! I am Thorsten (with a silent “h”). I am a writer, com­poser and pho­tog­ra­pher and on these pages I share per­sonal thoughts and poetry with who­ever may come my way.

Alternate:Words started back in 2003 as a web­site pro­mot­ing my writ­ing and edit­ing ser­vices and has since gone through mul­ti­ple revi­sions and redesigns (and so has the About page). The term “alter­nate words” orig­i­nally rep­re­sented my trans­la­tion and edit­ing ser­vices (German<>English) but has evolved to now stand syn­ony­mously for the way I approach writing.

Since chang­ing Alternate:Words from a web­site to a blog in 2006 to pro­mote my debut album “Infil­tra­tor – A Music­novel” (see “Projects” at bot­tom) it has become a much appre­ci­ated com­pan­ion on my path to find­ing my own cre­ative voice. What I write within basi­cally falls into two cat­e­gories: poetry and mus­ings. Both of them are rather var­ied though dri­ven by a fun­da­men­tal love for nature, my spir­i­tu­al­ity and my inter­est in psy­chol­ogy and phi­los­o­phy. My aim with­ing these pages is to be up-building, thought pro­vok­ing and moti­vat­ing. From time to time I share my strug­gles with cre­ativ­ity in an effort to encour­age those strug­gling in like man­ner. I believe in syn­er­gies and that we all are (inter)dependent on each other regard­less if we’re at our core highly inde­pen­dent or not.

In its cur­rent state Alternate:Words rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone on my jour­ney of cre­ative expres­sion. Not least through writ­ing on here have I come to the real­iza­tion that my truest pas­sion is sto­ry­telling and that its most fun­da­men­tal expres­sion for me is music. I grew up with music. As a tod­dler I learned walk­ing by my father turn­ing the bal­ance dial on his stereo from one side to the other. I lit­er­ally fol­lowed the sound of music as the speak­ers stood sev­eral feet apart. From him I got my  obses­sion with clar­ity of sound. My mother is a clas­si­cal music expert and exposed me to the greats of yore from an early age on. To this day Shostakovitch, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Haydn and Wag­ner are some of my favorite com­posers. As a result I began com­pos­ing myself while I was still a child though all we could afford back then was a tiny lit­tle key­board. It cer­tainly didn’t mat­ter to me as I tremen­dously enjoyed what­ever melodies I could coax out of it.

Music pro­vides the ini­tial spark which in turn ener­gizes my writ­ing. It’s an inher­ent syn­ergy of which I was always aware but not truly con­scious of until recently, helped in part by writ­ing on this blog. In addi­tion there is a strong visual com­po­nent which influ­ences much of my writ­ing. I’ve been enjoy­ing pho­tog­ra­phy almost equally as much, and as long, as music and these days it is an essen­tial part of my poetry and other writ­ings. And so has Alternate:Words come to rep­re­sent not only my point of view on var­i­ous top­ics but also my approach to telling sto­ries through music and imagery -  alter­nate forms of words.

In clos­ing I’d like to point out that Alternate:Words is not to be per­ceived as a clas­si­cal blog with the lat­est post being the most cur­rent state. I see it much more as a book with var­i­ous chap­ters where there is nei­ther old nor new. My poetry and mus­ings from a few years ago are still as rel­e­vant to me as those I just recently posted. Until blog­ging may evolve fur­ther to pay trib­ute to such writ­ing I encour­age you to peruse the archives and to feel free to com­ment on any post that speaks to you. I will most cer­tainly read it and respond! And if you’d like to get in con­tact with me directly you are wel­come to do so by send­ing me an email: info [at] alter­nate­words [dot] com.

Note: If you are inter­ested in learn­ing more about poetry I highly rec­om­mend this Wikipedia arti­cle, it explains in great detail how poetry is much more than just poems.