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’.

The Italian novel, Il serpente by Luigi Malerba, tells the story of a man who killed his wife. What is so special about it is his confession which is false or partly false. From the beginning, we know that the hero is about to kill his wife who he hates. We know that he buys a gun, but he is trying to deceive us by investigating another murder case of a man and his wife. This investigation teaches us about our own character’s morals, which are an important tool for writers. Between the chapters the author plants thoughts and ideas that connect to the story and teach us about the morals of the character and their relation to Christianity and the profane. I won’t tell you the ending I’ll just give a hint that this madness and twist of morals as seen through alien eyes is very fascinating, but doesn’t end well for the hero, who eats the woman he loves.

There are many detective books that follow a crime through the eyes of the detective. However, there are not so many that tell the story from the criminal’s point of view, I believe that this point of view is something very modern that began sometime in the 20^th century. Other examples of artworks that share the point of view of the criminal and the detective include Edgar Alan Poe’s ‘The Tell Tale Heart’, Chaplin’s film Monsieur Verdoux and Philosophical Investigation by Philip Kerr.  

One must remember that when a sordid thing occurs, (such as the act of cannibalism found in this book), the morals and the truth should be reestablished. This week I tried to show you a more original angle about morals. Next week we shall deal with books about people who were deprived of feeling – those with mental health problems.