The CBT met an author, Lee Da-eun, who has written short essays and poems about a variety of topics on SNS and has recently published a book, ‘The Season of Love’.

Q1) It seems that your major is irrelevant to writing; how did you start writing?

  Originally, I started writing when I was a freshman. However, I was devoted to studying my major and enjoyed my college life until my junior year. Then, I found myself writing on notepads while doing my assignments overnight. By seeing myself writing in spite of tight situations, I decided to try to start writing again. I created another SNS account only for posting my writings at that time. With the new account, I diligently posted my writings, and the number of followers increased to 600 people. After that, as I uploaded my pictures on my SNS account, people around me asked me, “The writer was you?” By the time I uploaded my pictures, I was seriously thinking about writing as a hobby or my future career. One year after I uploaded my writing on SNS, I published my first book.

Q2) How do you get inspiration when you write?

  When writing about love, I sit on a chair at dawn thinking about people I loved in order to recall the emotions. Even if I can imagine and create any situation, it is hard to make emotions artificially. Therefore, in order to write honestly, I have to write my own emotions and feelings. During this process, I have to ponder deeply about moments of happiness, sadness, anxiety, disappointment and so on. It might seem weird, but sometimes I get inspiration from my twin sister. Now and then, I watch my sister’s behavior with a lovable smile, knowing that I am seeing a person whom I love, and I put these feelings down in my work, so, in the middle of my book, my sister appears in my book as a man.

Q3) Please quickly introduce your book ‘The Season of Love’.

  I found the name of my book in somebody else’s writing. This writer said that it is taxing to think of someone every day if you miss someone a lot. Therefore, I thought that if there is a season to think of someone I miss, I only need to recall that season. When that season comes again, I will set my mind back to that precious moment. While reading my book, you can find four parts: spring, summer, fall, and winter. Originally, people relate the start of love with about spring. However, in my book, every moment of falling in love, including the farewell, is mixed up in each season. Actually, that is true in real life. Then, at the end of the book, I added content about starting to love, so I want to give feelings of the cycle of the four seasons.

Q4) What is your future plan?

  I really want to try writing lyrics. However, I realized that I have to study hard to be a lyric writer, and it also requires a lot of training and studying. Also, recently, I thought that instead of only composing literary work. I need to develop myself more, so I decided to hold off my future job as a lyric writer and author in order to learn to write more diligently. In addition, I have a short-term plan for one year. As I have an interest in becoming an indie publisher, I want to publish my own book using handwriting, not computer typing. Also, because my sister likes taking photographs, I want to collaborate with her by maybe writing on her photos.

By Min Byung-woo
bw38@cbnu.ac.kr