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’.

Being an actor, I can’t help but think how limiting it is to be physically challenged on stage. But what is the deadliest strike for a writer? To be paralyzed? To lose the ability to taste? If you ask Nathan Zach, the biggest curse is blindness. In one of his poems he wrote, “I wish I’ll always have eyes to praise the world,” but if you ask Borges, when God closes a window, literally, he opens a door. In 1955 Borges became the manager of the National Library in Buenos Aires. 900,000 books and all he could see is a kind of blue, green and yellow. No letters at all. This gave him a challenge to learn the English language from the beginning and to move on to Scandinavian literatures. Perhaps because it’s a very personal thing, his lecture about this subject keeps jumping from one subject to the next and he talks about blind writers from Homer and Milton to James Joyce, and says very important things about poetry that is based on eyesight. What I take from this lecture to my writing if the knowledge that blind people don’t see black but a mixture of colors, which is more disturbing, and the fact that although blindness can be a crisis it can also be a chance.

Jorge Luis Borges is probably one of the great wizards of modern western poetry. His books of lectures, like Siete Noches (Seven Nights) or The Craft of Poetry have always inspired me in my writing and poetry. I have always read his books from a very naïve perspective, thinking that he always really meant what he had to say, but a conversation that I had with the poet Israel Bar-Cochav taught me otherwise. We were talking about the originality of Bar-Cochav’s poetry and I asked him why he writes in such a unique style, mentioning that Borges once said in one of his lectures that people should return to the basics and that originality is one of the ills of the modern era. Bar-Cochav said to me, “You’re talking about that fox, Borges? He was one of the most original poets of the 20^th century!”

With this point of view I went to read Siete Noches. It’s not very easy to read and it does take time and effort, but I would love to demonstrate a smart reading of his lecture about poetry.

He starts by saying that a good book can be read in numerous ways and that a book has no meaning unless it is read, which I think are two clever remarks that show he is forming the link between the sacred and the profane. Then he talks about the fact that there is no meaning to the order of the words in a verse, but I think he means that there is meaning because it helps us to see reality in a new point of view. He deals with the question what is better to describe reality – poetry or prose? And regardless to his proofs, he decides that the condense poetry is the best because it links with our feelings but once more he is talking about poetry as a discovery, not an invention. Borges likes his poetry straight and simple, but once more he could be playing with us because when he concludes his lecture, he finishes it with the line, “The rose has no why, it blooms because it blooms.” I think that now I can understand better what Bar-Cochav told me, the key to great poetry is to be complex but to seek simplicity. I think that we shall stay with Borges and his blindness next week too.   

I thought my work this week would be easy but it turned out to be very hard. Since I have no interest in writing a summary of books on the history of Arabic literature (even though I’ve studied it for several years I’m not even scratching the surface) and since judging it by Nobel Prize Winners would be unfair, I decided to write about the lesser-known writers who are now accessible thanks to projects translating their work into English or other European languages.
The truth is that Arabic literature in western languages is very important to modern literature. Arabic scholars and Arabic society as a whole were deeply influenced by western literature. When I studied children’s stories from 19th century Egypt, I learnt that the first children’s stories in the Arab world were poorly translated from English and French in an attempt to embrace modern ideas. But at the same time the stories were neutralized of their deadly charge of despising tradition and re-written to keep the old social order of respecting the elderly. I remember one story that told of a ship that was burning and a child aboard the ship stood on it and remained until the ship exploded and he was blown to bits, all because his father told him to. I remember that I was amazed to discover that this story actually came from a Christian book.
Still on that matter, I remember one literary festival when I talked with a Palestinian writer from the Galilee and I asked him what it takes to be a writer. He thought that I was asking him how I can become a writer and he suggested that I read Guy de Maupassant and O Henry stories, but he didn’t or couldn’t point out a single Arab writer to learn from. I was always puzzled why that was. I’m the first to admit that in most cases, selective translations from Arabic to Hebrew are being made in the media everyday to prove that you can’t believe the Arabs. But then again great writers like Naguib Mahfouz (the Cairo trilogy) were translated to great success.
Several days ago I came across an anthology of modern prose and verse from the Arab peninsula that was published in 1988 called The Literature of Modern Arabia, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi. I felt relieved reading something that didn’t have post-modernism all over it. The thesis in the base of this anthology was that Arabic poetry moved from the need to keep the Arabic tradition intact, to more bold and revolutionary poems in free verse and with modern metaphors. It is still open to debate whether these Arabic poets are truly effective and are being read today, but the prose that was exposed to western literature in its beginning is now finding a balance between the old and the new. If I wish to give one thing that could be learnt from this anthology, it is that one doesn’t have to give up his ideas and tradition in order to write. The best thing for writers is to mix the old and the new. Furthermore, I would like to recommend this anthology as an introduction to Arabic literature and towards a modern understanding of the Arab Peninsula.

Chess is like wine or cigarettes; it has enormous cultural weight and history.
The ‘Game of Kings’ appears in many stories, maybe because like in a film it can be used as a metaphor. Chess is a dual, a shift in the balance of power between two people and perhaps is a good way to describe what was once called ‘idiot savant’ i.e. that they are failures in every field but chess.
Some of the most original and surreal uses can be found in Lewis Carroll’s books, when the chess pawns become characters. The real question is what we can learn from these games, which are a story within a story especially in the adult world, for instance, today the games we play are so complex that they leave very little room for imagination.
What interests me in the books that we are going to read this week is the fact that our writers and their characters are in going through a transition. Could chess be a key to connect the old world and the new and not just a battle of wits? I believe that the books we’ll read will show that this talent is not merely about wits – but a ‘psychological’ understanding, (no matter how obscene this word may sound).

Many poets refer to the duality of death as cruel and merciful. Abraham Halfi asks his mother in “The Gold Digger” if death is somewhat human or if he is deaf and dumb, Emily Dickenson describes immortality as a companion of death, and e.e. cummings describes death as a lover, but there is a gruesome feeling when you read Sylvia Plath’s description of the grim-reaper as two people who are the complete opposite but are both ire and outsiders. Since we know the end of the story sentences like “I am red meat”, “I’m not his yet”, “somebody’s done for” get an outer-textual meaning that influences the reading, but when I try to think what Plath reminds me of, I can’t help but think about Edgar Allen Poe. Especially the lines “The dead bell, / The dead bell.” are reminiscent of his poems about the iron bells. Both Plath and Poe were probably what their contemporaries would consider mad or insane. In fact, Plath wrote several poems about her madness. Plath’s life and work are strongly linked, although she was not a very prolific writer. If we compare The Bell Jar to her diaries we can see that she is telling her life story even though she wrote fiction (Johnny Panic and The Bible of Dreams, for example). A reference to her suicide attempts can be found in the poem “Lady Lazarus” Takes pride in her ability to die, one can say that she even longs for it (”Soon, soon the flesh,/The grave cave ate will be/At home on me… Dying,/Is an art, like everything else./I do it exceptionally well/I do it so it feels like hell./I do is so it fells real./I guess you could say I’ve a call”). But on the other hand, she still believes in her power to beat death – “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.” So basically one might say that her duality about death was something that accompanied her since her youth, and the constant need to walk the line fueled both her work and her downfall. I do not believe that all artists have to go through what she did, but one thing I would like to adopt from her behavior is her totality, the use of real life materials, and one more thing – In the introduction to her collected poems, Ted Hughes, her husband, said this about her: “Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of her materials, she was quite happy to get a chair or even a toy”(Pg. 13). Her will to continue creating at all cost truly inspires me. When I read her prose I also felt very connected to her insights about writing, but this should be written in a different post.

It gets filled with

Lies, sucks all of the fears, contradictions

Dreams, terrors, arts lusts tears.

Hans Magnus Ensensberger, the Blank Page

How shall we start? For me beginning is almost never a problem. The first sentence comes naturally. The words are molded in the mind, and my heroes are being sentenced very quickly. The problem begins when they appeal. The quest begins with the first step, but can we take another?

How shall we start? We can start by listening. “Call me Ishmael” is a wonderful gift from the unconscious. All we have to do now is to listen and not to mess it up. Another way is to start by telling the reader how hard it is to start, or to let the heroes tell the reader what is their motivation to tell the story. Just think of the beginning of the Divine Comedy.

“1 at midpoint of the journey of our life

2 I woke to find me astray in a dark wood,

3 for the straight way was lost.”

We have here a time, a place and a hero with a feeling that enables us to go in many directions a lot. Shulamith Hareven, the Israeli writer said that she likes the beginnings that change the world and the way of the world. In her article about beginnings she quotes the Polish Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz who begins his epic novel With Fire and Sword in the following manner:

“The year 1647 was that wonderful year in which manifold signs in the heavens and on the earth announced misfortunes of some kind and unusual events. Contemporary chroniclers relate that beginning with spring-time myriads of locusts swarmed from the Wilderness, destroying the grain and the grass; this was a forerunner of Tartar raids. In the summer there was a great eclipse of the sun, and soon after a comet appeared in the sky. In Warsaw a tomb was seen over the city, and a fiery cross in the clouds; fasts were held and alms given, for some men declared that a plague would come on the land and destroy the people.”

In one of her books Hareven tries to follow his footsteps. this is the beginning of her book Prophet in free translation:

“The right order of the world has come in to a grinding halt an hour after the sunrise. Instead of going to the pasture with the flocks of sheep and cattle, cramp against the narrow gate and pouring out like a slow sea upon the hills, the shepherds that stood far away began to turn around, pushing the herbs all over into the city. It was done quickly and brutally, with a lot of club shaking, like evening fell suddenly while the sun hadn’t finished coming out yet. “

But how shall we start our relationship?

Perhaps like on a blind date.

Hello, my name is Yoav Itamar. I’m 28 years old, I live in Tel-Aviv and I write, translate, act and I teach how to write.

This week we are going to deal with beginnings and what can we achieve from a successful writing.

The purpose of this blog is to think together about the different features of writing. I will share my thoughts with you and I hope we would be able to create wonders together.

You may contact me at yoitamar@gmail.com

Yours,

Yoav