The Anatomy of a Story

Yoav — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 19:46:32 +0000

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’.

Tristram Shandy

Yoav — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:29:03 +0000

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.

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The Anatomy of a Story

Tristram Shandy