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.