Successful Writer Blog

I feel that I’m on some sort of a quest. I could have published a novel or poetry collection years ago, but in a sense, I feel that would only limit me, because like in The Serpent, to publish something means that you are giving up on what it could have been.  I know that Walt Whitman changed ‘Leaves of Grass’ repeatedly and there are writers and poets that obsessively work on their creation even after it’s finished but still this is not the point.

John Truby’s The Anatomy of a Story is the first book that made me feel like I am a true story teller and that I can be a master storyteller no matter which vessel I use to tell my tale. The book pinpoints principals that one might say are driven from the world of script-writing such as ‘premise’ but are still true to everyone and anyone who tells a story.

Truby is very encouraging and covers everything: structure, characters, moral argument (which you probably know I think is highly important), scene, dialogue, symbols, and plot. He also gives key points that need to be defined like “the most important step in creating your hero, as well as all other characters is to connect and compare each to the other”. This is golden advice because our characters are sometimes just a state of mind (for instance we create a character to represent generosity or madness) but sometimes you want them to be contradictory, as in real life, where people are much more complicated and surprising. I highly recommend this book as it is written by an expert and it explains storytelling on a large scale and multiple genres. No wonder people see it as ‘The Bible of Telling Stories’.

I first encountered The Artful Edit when a writer recommended in the paper that someone should translate the book into Hebrew. Although I have not found a publishing house that is willing to translate it, I must say that reading Susan Bell’s book, in the few hours I had free this month (I got married a week ago), was an enlightening experience. I found this book to be one of the best manuals that deal with the not-so-glamorous work of editing.
No one likes to read their own work over and over again in order to mend his or her writings – most writers prefer to let other people (like me) read and edit their precious words. Don’t misunderstand me; I believe that developing a skill like editing one’s own work is an invaluable and important one. I, for example, can only edit my own work if I leave what I’ve written for six months and then come back to it with fresh eyes. In a way, only then can I look at it in the eyes of a stranger, not a lover of the text.
Still, in this bright book the examples for edited text are famous (she even uses The Great Gatsby), the matters are discussed in a clear language and that only proves that the writer knows what she is talking about. I had to learn and develop topics like micro-edit (editing on the sentence by sentence level) and macro-edit (editing characters, symbols, topics with a wider view) by myself while editing books. But, here, these tools are being handed over after deep thought. One thing I can say is that the book gives you a map of editing tools and styles such as editing version after version (using drafts and revising) or editing while you write. Personally, I think editing while you write is a method that fits poetry more than prose.
The bottom line of the book is that no matter how good your editor is you have to be strict with yourself too and do the most before you start the editing process.

While I was busy reading Orlando by Virginia Woolf, I came to the conclusion that this book was also a wonderful manual about writing. In the beginning Orlando’s problem in creating a poem is the dissonance between reality and the way he imagines colors and objects. Then there was a knock on the door and I received several books about writing from Amazon.com that I want to share with you this week.

The first book is The Making of a Story – A Norton Guide to Creative Writing by Alice LaPlante. This book holds in a nutshell everything one needs to know about writing. This book is read very easily, starting with the basic definitions of terms like ‘creative non-fiction’, which is a relatively new genre. The book is mostly written in second person and one feels that the writer is actually taken along on a journey with the reader.

A couple of exercises that I very much connected to because of my ideology and point of view on how to write books were the first exercises called, “Don’t know why I remember” and “I am a camera”. The goal of these exercises is explained as to “pinpoint some previously unexplored material that remains ‘hot’ for you in some important emotional way”. During this exercise you are asked to think of an important event which is not obviously apparent every day, like a birth, long-forgotten death or birthday and you render them on a page with the opening sentence, “Don’t know why I remember…” The point isn’t just to explain the reasons why the event is important, but to simply write it and put it down on a page.

The other exercise is to write a stream of consciousness passage, acting almost like a camera. The goal is to notice what you notice and to convey it without trying to explain or interpret it.

This book doesn’t give you a classroom solution but it does give you answers of other people, who completed the exercise, so even if you don’t have a writing group you can learn by yourself at home.  

I wonder if all these books over-simplify the process of writing. In many ways, writing is a science and since these ‘manuals’ are important, I will write about them this week.

Yiddish literature in Poland at the beginning of the 20^th century was fighting a losing battle against Polish literature. Uri Zvi Greenberg, the great Hebrew poet, once said that the sons of the Yiddish writers read better Polish than Yiddish. The most popular literature in Yiddish during that time was the Shund literature. I’m tempted to describe it as the ‘B-movie’ version of Yiddish literature, but some might presume it was more close to an Ed Wood film. A typical plot would tell about a Jew falling in love with Napoleon’s mistress and eventually she comes back with him to his hometown, becomes a Jew and marries him. Many honorable writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer? had to take part in this sort of literature to make ends meet. There were even voices in Poland at the time who called to take the license to write from those who took part in this literature.

Israel Rabon’s answer to Shund literature is his book, The Street, which describes the city of Lodz during the depression of the 1920’s, following the Russo-Polish War of 1921-22. The novel is about a soldier who tries to build a life in Lodz and fails miserably. Inspired by Norwegian author Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Israel Rabon’s point of view isn’t realistic. The situations he describes lack compassion for most of the time and there are descriptions that are fully imagined like a dream, including one where the soldier becomes a loaf of bread. But, as Picasso once said, “Art is a lie that is needed to emphasize the truth”. And one of the biggest lies in literature is to speak in the other sex’s voice and we shall deal with this subject next week.

Witold Gombrowicz is one of the most influential Polish writers from the first half of the 20^th century. Pornografia is a story about the corruption of two young resistance members by the author’s alter egos, who try to draw from the youth’s zeal. He was very critical about the culture of his country and saw it as a cultural wasteland. His devotion to youth culture reminds me of Yukio Mishima, as his dualism concerning youth and the grown-up world is somewhat similar because the two books end with murder. But here, unlike The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, the youth are manipulated to commit this murder, and are not the manipulators. What is so interesting about this book’s structure is that as Gombrowicz himself admits, he used a formula to write the book:

“My literature artwork is based on classical shapes… Pornografia is based on the good old Polish countryside story, Cosmos is a kind of detective novel, my theater is a parody of Shakespeare and my last play is a kind of operetta. I use classical shapes because they are perfect and the reader has become accustomed to them, but do remember – it’s important – that the shape, in my case, is but a parody upon shape. I use it but put myself outside of it, I’m looking for a connection between readable literary types and new, fresh world experiences.” 

This idea of basing a novel upon shape is one important lesson that I have learnt from Pornografia. The other great aspect is the alter-ego of the author who narrows the distance between the writer and the character – a character who tries to direct the events in the book and in turn makes the book more interesting.

The following article will be on another borrower of sorts – Israel Rabon.

Szymborska’s poetry is filled with personas even when she writes about the museum or describing a picture or the house of a great man, she would simultaneously, logically and powerfully show us a very unique point of view. But she also touches the archetype or core of the situation, where everyone – no matter where they come from – would identify with her. When she does refer to herself or her own family, it is always with a great sense of humor and to make a point like in the poem ‘Epitaph’.

This condition changes in her later poems. For instance, ‘The Puddle’, which describes her childish fear of sinking in a puddle, she is deeply lyrical but still anyone can identify with her description of childhood fears or the sunrise in ‘Early Hour’. What I take from Szymborska is indeed the understanding that a poem about a place doesn’t always have to be private; it can be more universal. Hence, as a poet, I can learn to inhabit this place of memories but not consume it with my seriousness.

In her Nobel Prize Winning speech she said that the basic point of view that every artist should begin with is that of “not knowing” and by saying “I don’t know” gives you a great deal more freedom that having all the answers. Another thing she says is that poets don’t have a monopole on inspiration. The real question is what you do with it. These are the lessons I take from her today. 

I have been avoiding answering a letter from the editor of Mashiv Haroach (a Jewish poetry newspaper) for some time. They are about to publish a volume about my homeland, the Negev and I have never written about my homeland seriously. One might say that everything you write is harks back to your home, and now, as I try to write a novel about Ben-Gurion University of the Negev I can see how many emotional charges are there, in the back of my mind. Still I feel that prose, being less concentrated than poetry is a far better way to overcome these obstacles. Or perhaps it’s because that there are some ways of writing that hurt too much, and the writer is only flesh and blood.

I did not plan this but the truth is the books that I chose to deal with this week of Polish literature somehow deal with the questions and problems that I have mentioned.  Pochwala Snow, the wonderful poetry collection of Szymborska’s poetry edited by Rafi Weichert, has the unique ability to give you exactly the poems you need whenever you need them, not only that, the book has a very interesting point of view on the subject of what is a homeland. For the very first time, I’ve read her Nobel Prize speech and there is a lot to learn from it about being a poet, as I shall write in the post about her.

Another book is Witold Gombrowicz’s book Pornografia that tells the story of World War II Poland without being there. Gombrowicz is one of the most important novelists of 20^th century Polish literature and in his first books he also wrote about the idea of youth and its internal battle in the grownup’s mind with adulthood.

The last article this week focuses on a Jewish-Polish writer called Israel Rabon. In his book, The Street, he describes his birthplace from the point of view of a Jewish soldier trying desperately to settle in Lodz. I will also talk about the simple and surreal Shund literature, which served as a basis for this book.

Jeanette Winterson’s book about a foster mother and son in 17^th century England is a travel novel that sometimes reminds some of Calvino’s work. This book gives a new meaning to science fiction because the ’science’ that is being challenged here is not the usual mathematics, physics or philosophy but rather history and the science of feelings. In other words, Winterson teaches us that science fiction doesn’t have to be about the future, it can also be about the past. What’s so special about this book is that even though it has references to historical figures such as Charles I, it isn’t an alternative history, because history runs its course along the book and no one denies what happened. The real protagonists of the book are not historical figures; most chances are that they never really existed. Most of all, if you read the opening lines you can see that Winterson, like The Bible, does not accept the idea that there is a present, past or future. The book breaks the chronological order of times and more than that Sexing the Cherry defies reality and that’s what makes it science fiction. We have to take a break from reality when words become a palpable thing where a banana is seen as a devilish obstacle. We can think that the idea that there is a city where people live above an open alligator pool is preposterous or the fact that two lovers can choke on their own words is weird, but don’t we all live on the edge of danger? And even though choking on one’s word is a metaphor to reality, where people are being hurt by words, even that is presented to us with the means of defamiliarization. One of the lessons that I take from this book is that science fiction doesn’t have to be science but a way to challenge our wit and feelings by looking at reality in a whole different perspective. And that is what great literature should do.

In the upcoming weeks we shall deal with gender and Polish literature, and if possible, we shall combine both.

2020   is one of a very small group of Israeli science fiction books, what is interesting that a great portion of those books are being written by women like Sara Blau or Hagar Yannay. This book is special because unlike Asaf Gavron’s Hydromania that was described in the newspapers as “sci-fi that isn’t sci-fi”, he is following the model of stretching the present reality (and in the case of the chaotic Israeli reality he should receive a reward for at least trying to do so). 2020 tries to tell a story that takes place in America in the near future, about a society that doesn’t have physical or mental love because of a virus that is a combination of AIDS and the swine flu.

Sometimes it works, sometimes there are glitches, for example, when the scientist begins to sing an Israeli children’s song there is no way that he could have known this song, and I wonder how the editor of the book did not notice this mistake. The book flows naturally and what is special is the fact that the hero of the book is a male doctor and the female author succeeds in understanding his point of view. This is a point that I will deal with in the following weeks the passing from gender to gender in literature. This book reminded me of the classic Dune, where the writer Frank Herbert knew the world of Bedouins in the Mediterranean in an in depth way. Similarly, 2020 is a book based on a world of science that Chamutal Shabtai, the daughter of one of Israel’s greatest writers Yaakov Shabtai, knows very well and I believe that in science fiction one must know his back yard very well in order to write this sort of book. JR Tolkien invented a world and a language but he did his homework on ancient civilizations, literature and languages. If one betrays the laws of his own world, it’s a greater sin than mistakes in realistic literature.

I believe that the whole purpose of literature is to teach us something about life. Even when one writes a poem about a tree we would have no knowledge about that particular tree without the writer as a filter. Science fiction asks the questions about life not in the past or present, but in some sort of imagined future. When you read a book like Solaris by Stanislaw Lem and you are amazed to see that the hero is reading something as traditional as a book, how do you react? One could ask should there be a limit to fiction in science fiction? Or must every detail in the book be imagined? Can one imagine complete surroundings that will be alternative to one’s own? These are all perplexing question.

I believe that science fiction isn’t really about the future; it’s about some sort of extended future that is being created by the present. In order to ask philosophical questions about the future, one should start with a connection point to the present. If this connecting point between the future and present should be books then let it be books, if one has to remember one of Einstein’s theories in order for the reader to feel at home while one asks about the meaning of life, then so be it.

Sci-fi books that were published in the sixties bear the mark of the philosophical and moral question of that time. The ideas, for example, that humans are superior and there are second class robots are parallel to questions about colonialism and human rights. I don’t believe that those questions were ever solved. One can see that those books deal with morals because whenever a book begins with murder or death this is a signal that moral questions are about to be dealt, especially in the work of Asimov or Philip K. Dick.

I love the way pseudo-science (invented theories by fictional scientists) is being poured into Solaris and this is something that should be learned by those who wish to put philosophy as the queen of their book. One must remember that she is but a slave of the plot. In the following article I shall try to show another aspect of creating an imaginary universe.