As an author, and through your novels, you give your audience more in-depth information about different cultures, societies, and religions. How do you see the impact of your writings on gapping the differences between East and West, North and South?
Storytelling is the most powerful tool to interact.
C’est une porte ouverte vers l’abondance - un enrichissement pour l’humanite -
It is an open door towards abundance -an enrichment for humanity -
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Le multi-culturalisme est un monde ouvert a la liberte, au progres et a l’alliance.
The multi-culturalism is a world that opens to freedom, progress and alliance.
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Секс – это наследственное. Если Ваши родители им не занимались, то и вы вряд ди получите такую возможность.
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I believe in a multi-cultural society, always have.
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Like you Adina, I love the mixture of cultures and customs.
Dubai comes to my mind. It is for me a melting-polt- where East meet West, North and South- It has all the ingredients ,” ca grouille,ca bouge, c’est excitant, c’est mysterieux.”
“Chapeau!” to the wise men in the Emirates for achieving such a combination.
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happens to me that my friends ask me to tell them a story.and keep asking again,I feel flattered.I feel important,and I understand people would be same.always.Like in the past,when minstrells sung their ballads.A story make us forget our problems,maybe gives us advice to solve some,seing the behaviour of heroes.Storry break the time rules,we feel we are above time,history,no boundaries,If no time ,we feel a little while immortals.Is some ideas I have read,but I agree with it.Does make sense.
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Dear Paulo
My home-schooled child has just discovered the art of story telling through hand-writing practice (a soon to be forgotten skill in this techno-age )
she has finally found the magic of adding one word to another, to take herself (and me) to new places and happenings.
God bless the story and the story tellers
xxxx
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Storytelling is also the best educational method ever. I used to be a schoolteacher and my students enjoyed stories. I could teach them even maths using stories for their age.
People tell stories all day long, that’s how we communicate. Jesus teached using stories. That’s probably how our mind is set-up in order to logically understand some times illogical things.
I absolutely love the mixture of cultures and customs, different religious ideas, different visions from different times and countries. Each one of them reflect a piece of the ANSWER we all look for our big life questions.
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I agree that storytelling is very powerful. But I think that music has an even bigger potential as it is naturally more comprehensive than words can be. And both combined can really be exceptional.
Love
Guenther
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http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBSYKz1SRBA&feature=related
It is so ..quiet here today!! The best version of the old song Marina, by Gipsy Kings.
Have a nice evening.
Love,
Thelma
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As William points out, you seem not to be confined as a writer to a single culture, place or religion. You create characters from widely diverse backgrounds, of different ages, of both sexes. Your novels are set far distant places - not limited to one city, or even to one country.
This intrigues me deeply, as I had a creative writing teacher once whose prime belief was “write what you know!” For him, this meant writing only about the people, places, worldview and lifestyle that you, as a writer, have known and experienced personally. I remember, in one of his classes, setting a story in Oaxaca, Mexica, where I had in fact lived for about a year. Although the story was essentially an American tale, about expatriates living in Mexico - a scene I knew quite well - he rejected the story wholeheartedly, saying that I should not write about places that I had travelled to, but only places that I “really knew,” such as where I grew up. He suggested I write a story set in Miami. Although I am American, the nuances of every city are different, and I had, at the time, only lived in Miami for about six months. I felt I didn’t know enough of Miami, didn’t have a real “feel for it” sufficient to set a story there.
Then, about a year or two later, I had another class with this same professor, a class on autobiography, and it was the same thing: “Write what you know!” I started a story, my story, a hundred years back, in the far north of Sweden (Norrland), along the present-day border of Norwy, among a family of reindeer herdersmen - my great grandfather’s people, the Sami. I thought: I may not have lived there myself, but it is in my blood - the place, the people, their lives run through my veins like the sands through an hourglass. I did a lot of research on life during that period and in that place and I wrote the first sixty pages, with great gusto and enormous enthusiasm. He read it and his response was: “Throw it out and start over.” The look of surprise must have registered on my face although I didn’t say a word. “Throw it in the trash can and start over,” he repeated. “You can’t write about that.” I still just looked at him. “Have you ever been to Norway?” he asked. “No,” I said, “But….” But he didn’t let me finish. “Do you know anything about reindeer?” he continued. “No, but my great-great-grandfather….” He cut me off again: “Write what you know. Now go! And start the story again. This time in the U.S., in Texas.” With that, he turned his back and walked away, and left me standing there thinking, But what if I want to tell the story of my great-great-grandfather? He never saw the shores of the United States, much less Texas. A warm place where it never snows was just a dream to him. But that dream IS my story; that dream is why I exist.
So, I see the way you write, about people and places and lifestyles far removed from one another, and I stand in awe at this. I know that you have travelled a lot, and no doubt your travel experiences must inform your writing to some degree. Still, I wonder about your methods of research: How much time and effort do you put into doing research into the places and lifestyles of the types of people you choose to write about? And do you do this research as you are actually writing - during that brief period it takes you to produce a book? Or do you do your research beforehand, in the two years prior, while the book is, as you say, “being written in your soul?” Do you always travel to the places before you write about them, or do you ever write about places you have never been?
You see - there are times when I feel mystified, almost “enchanted” by a certain place or people (a way of life) or period in time. It’s like a magnet drawing me, and all of my interests center in upon this one thing. Not permanently, as it is with people who develop life-long obsessions with this or that. But temporarily, for a few months or a year, there may be this place, this people, this character that is drawing me toward it. And I want to write about that. The is this sort of obsession that springs up from out of nowhere and last for a time, then fades. When I set down to write, for that time, everything that comes out is like the protons surrounding the nucleus of an atom - every word points toward that obsession, be it a place (Egypt, for example), a way of life (the life of Mongolian nomads), or a person (based roughly on someone I have know or heard of or read of, and usually more of a composite of a number of such people). The thing is, I can dream about these far away places, I can go there in books or on the internet, but I do not have the resources to travel at will and see all the things I’d like to write about in this world. What advice would you give to a person whose heart is magnetized by a place, whose soul is drawn to it, and who would wish to write about it, but who cannot go there? Do you think it is okay to write about places we’ve never seen with our own eyes? And if so, what type of research and how much is enough?
Thank you so much for being such an inspiration in my life (as well as to my writing).
With deepest sincerity,
Savita
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My dear Paulo Coelho, ’storytelling and …communicating with us, your readers, in your Blog, is the most powerful tool to interact!
Thank you for everything you offer us.
Love,
Thelma
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