Listen to this first:
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I read this story twice and to be honest, my first reading of it was quite literal, as are my first readings of most everything. I wondered why the different men kept showing up at Keret’s house and why they were so desperate to hear a story that they would be, ironically enough, willing to kill the story teller himself if they did not get what they were asking for.
As I reread this story, however, I began to see the three men in a very symbolic light.
I began to see the intruding men as symbols of both ideas and readers. They come in and demand a lot of Keret, the writer, and are overly abrasive about it. My good friend, who is a wonderful painter, told me about a terrible dream she had once. She was being forced to paint at gunpoint and was so terrified she woke up in a panic. (Thankfully she hasn’t had that dream again!) I imagine this to be a similar situation for Keret, except that he is a writer. He is being forced to write by the alluring nature of his many ideas and by the pushy nature of his readers who crave to hear his stories.
However, the old ideas/readers don’t necessarily always like the new ideas. The new ideas may feel inferior and proclaim things as “Why’s my timing off? ‘Cause I’m darker? ‘Cause I’m not good enough?” and wrestle for a position amongst the old. This can cause tension for a writer and might even make him feel “pretty uptight,” as self-doubt creeps in.
Though terrified, Keret begins his “story,” which is told orally. While telling stories is much different writing stores, I feel as though the focus of his being “out of his element” here serves to point out the discomfort of creating something, anything really. Keret states that, “he misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That’s right—something out of something,” speaking of the importance that stories are not pulled “out of thin air,” but rather, made from something already inside of the storyteller or writer. I couldn’t agree more. I think that the stories that really matter are always the ones that come from somewhere with the heart of the writer. Anyone can tell a meaningless story by making up a series of events and loosely stringing them together. However, it takes both unrestricted time and heavy thought to create a story with some sort of meaningful depth. Something, which cannot be interrupted by demanding, hasty readers or overly passionate, disassembled ideas that conflict with one another to the point of stopping any progress from being made.
Therefore, in order to achieve this meaningful or valuable story, the writer must pull from real life, as undesirable as his many “ideas” or “readers” may find this. It is not the most highly anticipated thing to read about real life, as the reason most people read or listen to stories is to escape their own, all too real, sometimes boring lives. It may even be appalling to the fantastically threatening ideas that knock on a writer’s door all day to have to dig up something from the real world and use it in a fictional story. But without what’s already there, no matter how fantastic or enthralling another idea is and otherworldly the story may be if said ideas are used, it isn’t going mean anything. In the end, it won’t really matter, because it didn’t already exist within the writer. And I think that most writers write to matter, whether or not they fully recognize it. Perhaps sometimes a writer just has to let there be “a knock on the door,” in order to progress the story. The difficult part is not letting these interruptions disrupt what was already going on or trigger the fear that comes along with creating something meaningful.
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Hank Green sheds more light on the subject as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGmAekTPD5c
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