FACTION AND FICTION

Only observing life?
The lesson I learned in Siena was important: to observe carefully and then to write about it. Good writers do both well. They write with a painter's mind and eye to details, making the text alive with succinct descriptions. The text becomes alive not just with concereteness but also with rhytm that runs the story forward filling reader's mind with pictures. The pictures are being created by the reader and they are his own. The good writer only provides hints or elements for the reader's creative process.

This is important, but somehow not enough for me. I have to learn more. I instinctively thought that my road is to somehow combine fact and fiction. The idea was still hazy to me, but I nevertheless named one section of my blog as Faction and Fiction. Mysteriously - as if just in time - I read an hour ago what Jorge Semprun said about it. It struck immediately true to me. This is what I also want to do.

This is what Semprun says in his book "Literature and Life". He speaks about Malraux, who according to him, was always reworking and mixing the material of his writings with his life. He shed light on reality through fiction, and illuminated fiction through the extraordinary destiny of his life. And in all this, his aim was to get to the fundamental meaning of both life and art. According Semprun, this is only possible if you have lived an extraordinary life. Writer needs to have besides their writers' skills also a biography, to have led an interesting life.

And yet, even this is not all what I need to learn.