Successful Writer Blog

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.

A friend from school bought me the first book as a present for my Bar-Mitzvah. For many years these books were extremely rare in Israel and it’s a shame because this is a book that combines the characteristics that we talked about in Sterne’s book – i.e. the fact that you can read these books again and again and only then understand their deep meanings. On the other hand, the humor in Douglas Adam’s books is a parody on science fiction or travel books but it is now accepted as a part of the genre itself, hence following in the footsteps of Swift. The omniscient narrator is not a persona but he is outside of the story, but what is so funny is that he is deadly serious about everything that happens and he is using history, philosophy and science in a grossly exaggerated way. It is true that this book catches you with honey and not with vinegar, but I believe that from the beginning, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy deals with the question of happiness and more than that, the fact that Jesus is mentioned from the beginning shows that we have made a full circle. Both of the author’s that wrote satires in the beginning of this week were priests and the idea that in a secular age a popular book can indeed talk about Jesus, brings us to the point where we see that the secular and the profane are both susceptible of humor. And this is a very important lesson for writers today, not to take themselves too seriously and they must know that they can make a difference with humor.

Next week we shall deal with my all-time favorite science fiction books.   

Not long ago, I read an article about Swift and his satires. The author was wondering why the satires of Swift, a humoristic genre remain so popular today. The answers that he gave are the following, and I shall elaborate with examples from Modest Proposal that I know well because I translated it to Hebrew. Modest Proposal is an article suggesting that Irish children will be sold to be eaten when they are a year old. What made him special is:

1)      His parodist technique that imitates acceptable styles of his days. The most famous example isn’t Modest Proposal but A Meditation Upon a Broom-stick that was written as an additional episode to Robert Boyle’s book.

2)      The use of personas that is rooted in Swift’s personal history and his debating abilities that enable him to invent solid arguments that he doesn’t agree with. In Modest Proposal he pretended to be a British economist.

3)      The exaggerated analogical thought is being dragged ad absurdum. When you try to follow his logic, you find it is ironclad and all his arguments are solid.

4)      The use of a serious pose of the persona. In some publications of his satires, he was smart enough not to use his real name, in fact, sometimes no name is used at all. I believe that this is why he was almost crucified for Modest Proposal but was never caught.

5)      His use of sexual and misogyny themes in his satires. The women figures that are mentioned in Modest Proposal are portrayed as weak and extremely poor. One girl corpse is even sold to be eaten.

6)      The fact that you never know when is he serious and when is he joking.

7)      His despair with the rational persuasions of his time. In Modest Proposal he says that no solution can be offered before trying it, (but one can understand that he is tired of solutions).

      His use of ‘dishonest’ ways to protect the right path. In Modest Proposal the crazy and cruel solution to kill infants who are one-year-old was given in order to point out the need for humane solutions. I guess that in the 21^st century we look at his dark satire with different eyes, especially after the Holocaust. But the truth is that unlike some accusations, Swift does, in the end, provide hope and rational solutions for the problems he is facing.

These are the basic principals found in most good satires that have been written since, but I shall demonstrate it further with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.

There are books and films that get discovered only after their author’s death. Laurence Sterne lived to enjoy his fame to the fullest. Even though he admits that he didn’t write for the love of art nor money, or the way he put it in January 1760, ‘I wrote not to be fed but to be famous,’ as it is told in the in the introduction to the Oxford edition of his well-known book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Two months later when he arrived in England’s capital and tried to buy a copy he was told, ‘there was not such a book to be had in London either for love or money’. But this book was not only popular, it won the critics acclaim for being a novelty and pushing the boundaries of literature forward because Sterne, unlike the common belief today that tries to lower the level of literature in an attempt to win popularity, tried to educate the public. He even said on at least one occasion that he wished he could have passed a law in Parliament that his book shall not be read by stupid people.

I guess this is one of the cases where the readers are being split into the categories of ‘good reader’ and the ‘bad reader’. The bad reader would probably look for all of the foolish and the immoral themes in the book, and even more than that would make comments about the fact that Sterne was a church minister and how could he think of betraying his wife. Whereas, the good reader would see this book as Sterne wanted it to be seen, as an archetypical dissection about imagination, lust and the attempt to look at things from different points of view. It could also be interpreted as an attempt to speak in a private language, where the author deliberately tries not to be understood. This so-called ‘biography’ teaches us so much about ourselves and about literature, that I believe no prose writer should write anything without trying to read Sterne’s masterpiece at least once.

I guess there’s no need to introduce this form of poetry, but I’ll tell you the laws quickly. An ideal Haiku should be composed of three lines (with 5, 7, 5 syllables) and it should include one word or so that describes the season in which the poem was written (not necessarily the name of the season). The poem must be written in a present tense and there are those that say the three lines must not be connected literally, although there are many Haiku poems that tell a story or ask a question, and that’s completely legitimate.

More than that, I wish to say that since we’re not writing in Japanese, the natural language of this art form, we are allowed to choose to ignore some of the laws, although I believe the beauty of poetry is when you follow all of the laws. And this is what I want to show you today – a guide to the gates of poetry.

Haiku is the perfect ‘gateway to poetry’ because it forces you to write a story in 17 syllables and to make the poem as solid as concrete.

For example, the lines:

“It is raining outside. My son has not returned from the pub. Someone is knocking on my door, a cop, oh my god.”

Could be translated to a poem like:

Rain, fingers tapping
Knock on the door, the future
I cannot open.

There is a poem by Bashu that shows how refined the Haiku poem can be. One of Bashu’s teachers asked him, ‘Where is your conscience now?’ And he answered in a Haiku poem:

“Old pond…
a frog leaps in
water’s sound”

This was a criticism against his teacher who bothered his meditation. One must know that a classical Haiku has the spirit of Zen all over it. There are many genres in this ancient Eastern form and some of them are present in Western poetry, for example, there is the Death Song that wasn’t necessarily written as the final poem and could have been written several times during the poet’s lifetime. Here is a touching Haiku by Senryu:

“Like dew drops
On a Lotus leaf
I vanish”

While a modern poem can deal with such mundane matters as an escalator in the mall. We’ll deal with modern poetry next time.

Weekend – fundamental truths in writing
I, as an author, believe that the basis for knowing the other is to know thyself. Therefore, I believe that there are but a few stories that exist, and that just as there are those who claim that all of Western philosophy is nothing more than footnotes to Socrates, and that human beings can be divided into Aristotleian people and Socratesian people, so there are those like Jorge Luis Borges. When I studied writing I was told that Borges thought that there were but two stories in the world, the story of Christ and the Odyssey. When I finally got to read his most interesting book of lectures – The Craft of Verse – I understood that what he was really saying is that there are three sources for stories in the world: the Bible, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Borges thinks, or at least that is how I understand it, that all of the stories that we need are in those three books, and original modern stories are a novelty we should put aside.     
I have no intention of quarreling with this point of view, but I do think that you do not have to be original all the time. I think that a nice writing exercise is to take for example the story of Cain and Able and to tell it again from your own point of view. Dan Pagis, who is a wonderful poet, brought this story to new heights and still, I will not discard any work just because Pagis has already written on the subject. The only real test for an artwork is whether it is good or not and whether it contains the spirit of its time.
This week I wish to deal with several plays that are so famous they have become classics. I would like to look at them from an arspoetic point of view. I do not know whether what I will say is a novelty, but I am certainly going to give them my perspective.

“As the picture is reality, so the novel is history. That is the only general description (which does it justice) that we may give of the novel… it is not, any more than a painting, expected to apologize.”

“Beauty and truth. To be constituted of such elements is to have purpose enough. No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.”

                                                                                                                  – Henry James 1884

There are many essays and books with this title, and normally they are meant to teach you how to write or take yourself seriously. Ayn Rand, who authored a book called The Art of Fiction, talks about the need to know the language well, about using the words clearly, about theme, about plot, but what about the basic question – what is that makes poems and prose different from day to day life and stories?

Many Israeli books are freely based upon reality. Whenever editing other writers’ fiction, I try to dig deeper or to understand why this or that line was written in this sort of manner and not another. I usually come to the conclusion that it must have happened in real life. But literature isn’t real life, it condenses, it enlarges, normally I say that it takes three real people in order to create a fictional character. That is to say that the writer has to take the qualities of at least three different individuals to form one single character. It’s sort of like a 1:100′000 map, it’s only a representation of real life and if we would construct a city identical to the map, we would fail miserably. There is one literal historic epic that tries to do just that – À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust that is known to the English reader as In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past. He attempt to write down decades of his own life. This work of art ended only with the author’s death and one can say that this is also a failure to grasp and describe real life.

One can ask, ‘What is the importance of real life?’ and ‘Isn’t literature more important?’ Shakespeare wrote in the 18th Sonnet to his lover that “So long as man can breathe or I can see. So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” and in a way this shows us how literature can be almost like a time machine. Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg, a Hebrew essayist and thinker made a mockery out of Jewish researchers who tried to determine whether Moses was a real person or not. In one of his essays he claims that the importance of Moses as a literal character who affected so many people along the ages is far more important from the question if he is a truly historical figure, so this brings me to the question, ‘What is important in the art of fiction?’

I believe that in order to create something meaningful one must strike a nerve, a fundamental truth in his writings and that is something we are going to talk about next week.

About a year ago I was invited to take part in a science fiction evening. I normally write poems and short stories that are very realistic, but I thought I’d write something special for this evening so I asked the man in charge, “What is science fiction?”
He said, “Think of Dune for example.”
I said, “I’m sorry but for me Dune isn’t science fiction because it’s very much based on the nomadic tribes of Arabia, the characters use the Arab language, and if instead of spice they would have fought of gold or oil, it might have been very realistic.”
“But you can’t say it about Asimov, can you?” He asked.
“Well I can because I admit that I have not read much of the 60’s science fiction but from what I’ve seen, in order to debate philosophical questions they take moral issues from the everyday news, and stretch the reality to the edge, the only thing that is fiction in this sort of science fiction is that the writer believes that the future is nothing but an extreme present, and does not take the trouble to imagine that the world can really change. There are but a few books that imagine a brave new world, and they are normally very wrong because the Achilles’ heel of every science fiction book is its link to the present that is ever-changing.”
The thing I love the most about science fiction is satires like The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy because in this kind of book, the joke is on us. The failure to predict the future is inherent and I can truly enjoy the jokes and not to take the predictions very seriously.
“Do you actually claim there’s no science fiction?” He asked, after a long silence.
“Well, I don’t know. Science fiction is like asking the question, ‘Could God create a rock he could not lift?’ In the end you can’t describe anything that is not built on the basis of what God and Man have created, and you cannot imagine the unimaginable.”

What is science fiction? Is it a merely genre packed with moralistic books? By the same token, does this make detective stories philosophy? Do we have greater freedom once we declare something as science fiction? Does it even have to be related to science? Does it even have to contain a moralistic thread at all? Or is it pure escapism? What do you think?

I didn’t have time to write all that I had planned this week so Orwell will have to be delayed to the upcoming weeks.
Today I would love to introduce you to an author who was also down and out in London in the beginning of the 20th century – Josef Haim Brenner. Some of his work was translated into English and Spanish but the truth of the matter is that I don’t know if his work could be understood completely outside of the Jewish Zionist background in which it was created, it has been written in the Wikipedia about his work:

“Brenner was very much an ‘experimental’ writer, both in his use of language and in literary form. With modern Hebrew still in its infancy, Brenner improvised with an intriguing mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish, English and Arabic. In his attempt to portray life realistically, his work is full of emotive punctuation and ellipses.”

Brenner is truly phenomenal in Hebrew, but some say that his life, that ended tragically is far more important than his creation. Therefore, it’s important for me to begin this week that focuses on realism with several sentences that he wrote, especially because S. Y. Agnon, the Nobel Prize winner wrote about him after his death that he was a writer with no imagination. In a very well known article, ‘The Israeli Genre’, that he wrote after he immigrated to Palestine, he asks fundamental questions about how we characterize a place that has no history. He says that he as a writer has no problems describing the characters from Russia but the Israeli characters come across as caricatures and the whole idea that there is an ‘Israeli Genre’ is pathetic. Later on he touches the problem in describing such a small place. Every story you tell is bound to be connected to someone you know, people do not believe that you can imagine something that might have been; they wish to be remembered in the novelist’s writing and once published they are offended by his writings.

This is the theme we are going to deal with this week: what is fiction what is non-fiction? Do we really have protection in the declaration that this is a ‘work of fiction, any resemblance to real people and events are purely coincidental.’

Hello everybody,
I was so preoccupied with the closing of my favorite bookstore, which saved me numerous times while I was looking for sources for my writing classes that I was unable to finish the posts I promised you about evil.  Instead, we’ll have to deal with it this week.
One of my friends criticized my point of view about the literary condition in Israel. This friend, let’s call him J, says that he thinks the reason that literary criticism in Israel is in a shambolic state is because the critics in the past were well educated and they were not a part of the academy. Today, all of the well educated critics are doctors and professors, and they are subjected to politics and they do not keep the old calling of Barukh Kurzweil: “If I would pity the writers, who will pity the readers?”
The newspaper critics are not as educated and talented as those who come from the university and the literature suffers. Alex Zehavi, god rest his soul, who was a critic and editor, told me that when he wrote criticism for Keshet – one of the most important literary magazines in Israel from the 50s – 70s and later during the first decade of the 21st century, the editor concealed his identity and would not reveal it despite authors’ pressure. Would there be an act so generous today? I doubt it. Not just because the editors are not like they use to be, but today writers write for glory and this affects their writing. Today it’s not the writer nor the reader that are important, but the critic himself.
About my claim that if the literary genius would show up today the book market would not help him thrive. J says that a society should be ready for the successful writer to appear like Russia in the second half of the 19th century, and Israel is well ready to groom the next genius. From what I see in my writing class, Israel has many talents, most of them are wasted for all sort of reasons, some psychological, some economical, but no one can deny that today, despite the economical crisis, the price tag for taking part in Tel Aviv’s cultural life is not cheap, and does not assure you successes.
I told J that one of the reasons I’m so happy writing this blog is that it can be a meeting place for all sorts of literatures and we talked about the fact that this dialogue is much more present than people think. But that is something to talk about another time.
Yours,
Yoav