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’.

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.

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.

“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 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.

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

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 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.