Anatomy of a Story

First published in GRIND II, pages 42–61.

Grandparents, thank you for being part of my life, and I know you're watching over me from somewhere up there now!

After re-reading the story, as I sat down to write this article, something lovely clicked for me, and it has to do with my paternal grandparents, who passed away about a year ago, two months apart. Digging through the drawer of memories, I came across the ones from my childhood in the village.

Out in that rural landscape, my grandparents would tell me stories in the evening (my grandfather especially) before bed. And these were never evenings where my brother and I lay quietly under the blanket waiting for someone to read to us from a book. They were wild, noisy evenings, with my grandfather imitating all sorts of dragons (zmei) and valiant princes (feți-frumoși), colossal battles, fantastic creatures, magical and rich kingdoms, while we bounced around the place with joy or hid in secret nooks whenever the monsters turned up. At his urging we'd come out of hiding and fight the beasts he imitated, complete with all sorts of onomatopoeia.

Leafing through those memories, I found a story suspiciously similar to Harap-Alb's – with the bear under the bridge, the stag with a star on its forehead, the two coloured emperors and the girl with magical powers who turned into a bird. But my grandfather was a simple country man with minimal education, and he never used a book when he told stories. It's very likely he heard this story from his own grandfather, without knowing its name or its author, and retold it to us the way he remembered it. So Mr Creangă is responsible for the wonderful childhood evenings I spent with my grandparents. Because of that, however well or badly the story turns out, it will always have a special place in my heart, alongside the two of them.

MORAL OF THE STORY

The theme of a story (MORAL ARGUMENT) is the author's point of view on the behaviour that should be adopted in the world where the hero exists, and it can be easily applied to the reader's world.

Truby says that every time we're shown a character making progress through concrete actions towards fulfilling their desire, a series of moral choices is revealed to us. The hero explores a succession of answers to various dilemmas, aiming to make the right choice.

That theme can be as complex and branched as the storyteller's imagination is boundless. For example, the film “Batman Begins” abounds in themes and moral dilemmas. From the question of identity (sacrificing your real one and creating a vigilante alter ego to fight organised crime), to the fragile balance between revenge and justice (Bruce Wayne, with Rachel's help, overcomes the demons of revenge and chooses justice), right up to the film's major theme: fear (and the use of it to create a symbol that instils terror in the hearts of the members of criminal organisations).

Ion Creangă uses one that has existed since the very first stories appeared: the fight of good against evil, and the hero's triumph over a universal antagonist.

Because GRIND is a gaming magazine, and as I did in the first issue of NEXT LEVEL, I'd like to give you a few recommendations for games inspired by Romanian mythology. You can start any time with “Yaga”, the creation of the folks at Breadcrumbs Interactive. If you got your hands on the April 2020 issue, then you surely got a code too, letting you download the game for free. And if you want to carry on with something else... well, I recommend the internet search engines, because right now nothing else comes to mind and I've already sprawled across too many pages.

A really important part of any narrative is the characters in it. I talk about them as a whole because they shouldn't be treated individually, but taken together, as threads in a fabric that complete each other

(CHARACTER WEB).

All the characters are connected to some extent and define each other, whatever the relationship between them (Spânul, being in conflict with Harap-Alb, forces the hero to act and represents the evil necessary to set the maturing process in motion).

The writer built his characters on archetypes already present in Romanian folklore, with small variations: Harap-Alb is the prince (Făt-Frumos) who sets out on a journey of transformation from a naive young man into a responsible man who saves his heart's chosen one.

Spânul (Zmeul) is the embodiment of evil, the character who wants to get his hands on the kingdom and the hand of the emperor's daughter by any means.

The Red Emperor's daughter (Ileana Cosânzeana) is the hero's feminine ideal, endowed with magical powers.

The horse (calul năzdrăvan) is the hero's ally and adviser, standing by him even in the final battle with Spânul. Saint Sunday, an old woman with magical powers, is another trusty ally and the first to initiate the boy.

A string of other one-off secondary characters, allies of the hero, turn up in the second half of the story.

Among them we find the oddballs with supernatural powers – Ochilă, Setilă, Gerilă, Flămânzilă, Păsări-Lăți-Lungilă – plus the queen of the bees and the ant. I'll be a bit of a grump here and say that these have no impact whatsoever on the protagonist's development. The help he gives the insects reflects a quality the prince's son already had from the start. As for the others, their presence is justified only by the son's need to get past a particular obstacle, which makes this stretch of the story feel fragmented and artificial. Even so, this part of the story benefits from a technique the author uses called four-corner opposition (FOUR-CORNER OPPOSITION). Unlike most stories, where we get the classic set-up of conflict between protagonist and antagonist, this technique involves bringing in two more secondary opponents.

Picture the hero and the three enemies, each in one corner of a rectangle, each of them as different from the others as it's possible to be.

With values and motivations of their own, each attacks the hero in a different way, while also being in a kind of conflict with the rest. Something like that opposition, to a degree, is: Harap-Alb, Spânul, the Red Emperor and his daughter.

“…HIS SUPPORT IS

A

SPIDER'S WEB” GHOSTS OF PAST EVENTS

These seven basic rules are the minimum a story has to meet (out of twenty-two in total) to be a story in the true sense of the word. Because space won't allow it, I'll mention just a few of the rest in brief.

The “ghost” and the world in which the story unfolds (GHOST AND STORY WORLD). The term sounds odd, but the “ghost” is a character's backstory – what happened to them in the past, before the story begins. It's an earlier event that still haunts them in the present. It's like an open wound that leaves the hero psychologically and morally weakened. It could also do the job of an inner opponent.

In the case of “Harap-Alb's Story”, most of the characters don't have a “ghost”. In the hero's case, we can suppose it's the way he has lived his life up to now – a carefree existence with no obligations at his father's court, which shielded him from the cares and hardships of the world outside. That stops him from reaching his true potential, from taking his life in his own hands and becoming the capable man the kingdom needs. Not every character has to have a “ghost”, but details like this give a story depth. Like the “ghost”, the world is there from the start – and the one Creangă created is a fantastic one, crammed with characters and creatures inspired by Romanian mythology.

The inciting event (INCITING EVENT) pushes the hero to set himself an objective and take steps to reach it. It's the link between need and desire. The event that flings our hero into the middle of the action is the message from his uncle and the failure of his older brothers.

The new equilibrium (NEW EQUILIBRIUM) is the seventh and last minimum requirement a successful story has to meet. Through this new equilibrium, things go back to normal, but there's one major difference.

The hero has reached another level of personal development. A fundamental and permanent change has taken place in him, and it can be positive (in the case of a “positive change arc”) or negative (a “negative change arc”). We'll discuss the middle ground (the “flat change arc”, superbly described by K. M. Weiland) on another occasion. In our case, it's a positive change.

Through his sacrifice, the hero unmasks the usurper and helps to destroy him (“...and once he snatches him by the head with his teeth, flies with him high into the sky, and then, letting him go from up there, the Spân turns to dust and ashes down below”), metamorphosing into the person he was destined to become: the true ruler of the land, just, brave and merciful.

This change comes about through the death of a credulous boy and the symbolic rebirth of a man worthy of leading (“And the Red Emperor's daughter... quickly puts Harap-Alb's head back in place, encircles it three times with the three sprigs of sweet apple, pours dead water to stop the blood and make the skin knit, then sprinkles him with living water, and then Harap-Alb immediately revives”). After the final confrontation and transformation, the two young people receive the blessing and the rule of the empire, and calm settles in through the new balance.

The rivalry between protagonist and antagonist generally begins to take shape around the middle of the story.

It continues until near the end, when the confrontation (BATTLE) takes place, determining which of the two achieves their goal.

Conflicts don't have to be physical. They can take any form, as long as they keep the hero and the antihero in a competition whose final objective is the same desire, the same goal.

It can be a psychological or intellectual struggle, a sporting contest... the only limit is the writer's imagination. In Harap-Alb's case, it takes the form of a series of ever more difficult trials, “Herculean labours”.

The hero manages to complete the extraordinary tasks, much to the Spân's irritation.

Thanks to every success he earns, and with the help of his friends, the boy gains the courage and strength to defy him openly and to enter the final confrontation with his enemy (“Come on, mount me and hold on tight, for now I shall show my powers right from here, from this spot, in spite of the Spân, to put venom in his heart”).

The battle is an intense and painful experience for the hero. It prompts a major revelation

(SELF-REVELATION)

about himself and how he must act towards those around him.

It makes him strip away the facade he has been hiding behind all this time and judge himself honestly for the first time.

Removing this mask must be the bravest thing the central character does in the whole story. In our story, it happens when Harap-Alb has to return to his master, the Spân, to hand over the Red Emperor's daughter. This moment is the hero's final coming of age, the point where he realises how much suffering and trouble he has caused his loved ones and himself through his inability to face the enemy. Here he becomes aware of the dire consequences of his lack of initiative: the Spân marrying the girl he has fallen in love with, and an entire land condemned to serve a despotic and malevolent ruler (“The girl smiles cheerfully at him...but in their chests arises...a longing; a proud, bright sun...and the further they went, the more Harap-Alb's mind became troubled, looking at the girl and seeing how young, how beautiful she was…

The lettuces from the Bear's Garden, the stag's hide and head, he took to his master... but the Red Emperor's daughter, he almost couldn't bring himself to take her, being madly in love with her.”).

He chooses self-sacrifice and the unmasking of the impostor (“And the Spân, seeing his trickery revealed, rushes like a rabid dog at Harap-Alb and takes his head off with a single sword blow...”). Admittedly, our hero gets a bit of a shove from the girl to make this sacrifice, but we'll overlook that (what kind of man doesn't get shoved by a woman into doing something uncomfortable?).

Action isn't possible without a PLAN, the fourth mandatory component of a story. The plan is a kind of set of rules and strategies the hero uses to come out victorious, and it is organically tied to the desire and the adversary.

It can take many forms, from the ambiguous and vague to the most obvious and complex. There are even combinations of the two. I'll use Rian Johnson's superb murder mystery, Knives Out, as an example. In this 2019 film, the renowned and eccentric Benoit Blanc (masterfully played by Mr Daniel Craig… and yes, all the over-the-top acting is there for a precise reason) tries to solve a crime. If the very genre of the piece changes during the film (with a simple coin toss), it shouldn't surprise us that the characters' roles flip several times too: who is the hero and who is the opponent? Who is in conflict with whom? Who is allied with whom?

Knives Out manages to build suspense and tension, keeping us on the edge of our seats until the end. Back to our point: it was only on a second viewing that I fully understood the brilliant plan of the ridiculous detective (again, deliberately so) to fulfil his desire to uncover the real killer and beat his adversaries. That plan is vague, yet complex at the same time (of course he noticed Marta's shoes at the very first meeting).

Back to our hero: what is his plan?

It's true that he wants to reach his uncle's court to take on the duties of a ruler, to his father's satisfaction. He sketches out a plan with the help of his allies and his father's advice, but it's very poorly defined. Almost non-existent.

Harap-Alb travels guided by the moral precepts instilled by his father and the advice he gets from Saint Sunday, opting for a rather non-violent solution (“...ask him to give you the horse, the weapons and the clothes he wore as a groom, and then you'll be able to go where your brothers couldn't; because it was written from above that this honour should be given to you”).

The goodness of his heart brings formidable allies across his path, who help him when he's at an impasse and see him safely through every trial he is put to (“Harap-Alb, because you are so good and have gone to the trouble of making us a shelter, I want to do you a good turn in my life; here, take this wing, and whenever you need me, light it, and I will come to your aid at once”).

Well, in “Black Panther” it's impossible not to empathise with Killmonger, not to understand his frustrations, his arguments and his thirst for revenge.

His reasons for claiming the throne of Wakanda and despising the nation's passive international policy are justified by the injustices he has endured since an early age. He is so well written that it isn't hard to understand his motives, even if the methods he uses are wrong.

At the opposite pole is an antagonist from another superhero film (...yes, I'm that sort of person who watches superhero films).

I'm talking about Laurel Hedare in the film Catwoman. Laurel worked as a model and was fired by a cosmetics company to be replaced by a younger woman. To get her revenge, she tries to launch a line of cosmetics that users have to apply constantly, because otherwise their faces melt.

Back to our opponent, the Spân: I'd place him somewhere between the two examples above.

He has no backstory; we never learn what drives his actions and his conflict with the hero. From the very first pages we are told he is evil (“Just remember the advice I give you... beware of the Red Man, and especially of the Spân...”), and he confirms it himself by voicing his tyrannical convictions (“If beasts were not restrained, they would have long ago torn man apart. And you must know that among men, most are beasts, who must be held in check...”; “You don't know what a devil's fruit this Harap-Alb is... only I can deal with him... I see you indulge your subjects too much. That's why the deer don't give you precious stones and the bears don't give you salads...”). Yet the story gives us no clue to the psychology behind the Spân's deeds. We are asked to accept his diabolical nature without any justification. Still, so as not to be too critical, we can assume the Spân is opportunistic by nature and, once he learns Harap-Alb's identity, covets the empire. The author gives him the same desire as the hero: to receive the empire. That puts them in constant collision.

numaiHarap-Albpoam-a„Nu știți eu dracului îi vin de

e

hac…” what

The antagonist (OPPONENT) is an essential piece without which the story wouldn't exist. They shouldn't be treated as an entity invented purely so that the hero has an anti-hero to clash with, just for the sake of a clash.

This isn't a malevolent person just for the sake of being malevolent. The opponent has their own motivations, and they don't simply want to stop the central character from reaching their objective – they're in direct competition with them for the same thing. They're like two competitors in a race with a gold medal waiting at the end. Give them both the same goal, with each driven by their own powerful motivation, and they're forced to engage in confrontations throughout the story. Before we get to our opponent, I'll give two examples, one positive and one negative. In ‘Black Panther’, director Ryan Coogler understood what the big problem is with the films Marvel produces – the cardboard antagonist, thirsty for power, who wants only to destroy the world, control it, decimate it, or any other variation that involves inflicting suffering on everyone around them (I'm generalising, but that's roughly the gist, however small or large the slice of the cosmos it applies to).

Desire (DESIRE) is the second condition, and it denotes an obvious concept: what the hero wants, their ultimate objective.

The story only becomes a story in the true sense of the word once the protagonist expresses their desire in some form (directly in dialogue or through any other, subtler means). This is the engine of the narrative thread: it's what pushes events forward and what signals to the audience that they occupy the central place. Though entirely different, desire is intrinsically tied to the central character's need – and in most cases, when they reach their objective (fulfil their desire), they satisfy that need as well. The two serve different functions in relation to the reader or audience: need lets the reader/audience discover how the hero has to change in order to have a better life, while desire urges the reader/audience to aspire to the same ideal as the hero. As an exercise in imagination, we can picture desire as something on the surface of the water, in plain view, and need as something below the waterline that has to be discovered. In our case:

NEED: Harap-Alb must become a mature and responsible man, and understand the laws that govern people and the world they belong to.

That can only happen if he leaves the comfort and safety of his father's home and faces destiny head on.

DESIRE: Harap-Alb wants to travel to his uncle's palace to receive the kingdom.

TO SEVEN STEPS BRING THEM ALL

The book's own title suggests that, to become an experienced writer, you have to keep twenty-two steps in your sights.

So why are we talking about only seven? Truby believes the difference between a disastrous story and one with potential comes down to hitting this minimum of seven steps. The seven elements don't have to be forced into the story's construction – they are its core, its DNA, and they follow naturally from the premise and from the design principle. They're the stages every human being has to pass through in order to solve their existential problems, to evolve and to become a fulfilled, better person.

Weakness and Need (WEAKNESS AND NEED), taken together, are the first of the seven minimum conditions to be met. Of course, we're talking about the main character, who from the very start of the narrative has to possess one or more weaknesses that keep them from their full potential. Need is an obstacle that looks insurmountable, but the hero has to get past this stage to overcome their weaknesses. Becoming aware of those weaknesses, attacking them and defeating them are essential parts of the process. We're talking about the sense of fulfilment the character has to acquire in order to transcend their condition and be reborn as a new person. Applying all this to our story, we could say: WEAKNESS: Harap-Alb is an unripe young man of noble birth, immature, naive and inexperienced, who doesn't know life's hardships.

NEED: Harap-Alb must become a mature and responsible man, and understand the laws that govern people and the world they belong to. That can only happen if he leaves the comfort and safety of his father's home and faces destiny head on.

It should be said that, in a good story, the writer gives the central character a psychological weakness as well as a moral one. A psychological weakness means overcoming a flaw that affects only the hero, whereas a moral one means overcoming a flaw whose effects spill over onto those around them. Reading the story, I noted with indignation how the protagonist's blind trust in people, his irresponsibility, his naivety, his lack of the strength of character to face his fate and change his condition all fall on the people he loves and on the world around him. Unable to break the chains that hold him captive, Harap-Alb watches helplessly as one of the most diabolical men in the world sets himself up as him in a ceremony, with the aim of usurping his uncle's throne and marrying the Red Emperor's daughter. Under the Spân's influence he commits some of the vilest deeds (among them the killing of one of the world's noblest and rarest creatures, the stag with the hide studded with precious stones).

As I said above, Truby argues that the writers' approach built on the three-act skeleton (building the outer shell first) gives the story a mechanical, generic character.

A successful story needs organic development, and that's only possible if you adopt an internal approach. But how do you do that? The answer comes in the shape of the next two concepts, two construction devices. The first is the premise. It is the whole story compressed into a single sentence. It's the foundation the whole story is built on. As a rule, the premise sentence is the simplest possible combination of characters and plot, and it contains an event that sets the action in motion – small details about the heroes and about how it ends.

Once a solid premise has been found, the writer has to think of a strategy for telling the story. And that strategy, boiled down to a single sentence, is the story's designing principle (designing principle – it sounds so much better in English). If the premise is the foundation, the designing principle is the seed of the story, and it's the single most important factor in creating an original and effective story. If the premise is concrete, then the designing principle that has to derive from it is abstract. We're talking about a profound process that runs the whole length of the story. It can be a symbol or a metaphor. To get these techniques across, I'll once again take one of my favourite books, by James Joyce, as an example: ‘Ulysses’.

PRINCIPLE PREMISE PREMISE DESIGNING PRINCIPLE

Returning to The Story of Presenting a day in the life of an ordinary man in the city of Dublin. In a modern odyssey through Dublin, over the course of one day, one man finds his father while another finds his son. Harap-Alb – let's try the same thing.

PREMISE DESIGNING PRINCIPLE

The youngest son of a king sets out on a journey at the end of which he receives the kingdom's throne from his uncle. An inexperienced young prince sets out on a journey full of dangers that matures him, turning him into a true man and a strong king.

Branching story (the branching story) stretches out from a common point, splitting off and adding ever smaller parts, like the branches of a tree.

You find it in more advanced narratives such as the social fantasy ‘Gulliver's Travels’ by Jonathan Swift, or in ones with multiple heroes like ‘American Graffiti’ by George Lucas – a film that doesn't get mentioned as often as it deserves.

In the case of the explosive story (explosive story), we find multiple narrative threads spreading in different directions at the same time. Their equivalent in nature is volcanoes or dandelions, because the events are a little more complicated.

That's because in a story it's rather difficult to put several things in front of the reader at once.

The difficulty tends towards the impossible – strictly speaking, there are no explosive stories. Even so, the appearance of simultaneity can be created. Film uses a technique called ‘crosscut’ (the intercutting of scenes).

Master writers and filmmakers use this pattern in combination with the serpentine, spiralling or branching approach, experimenting and showing their creativity.

James Joyce gave us the brilliant ‘Ulysses’, Quentin Tarantino gave us the much-applauded ‘Pulp Fiction’ and, for a more recent example, I'll mention Christopher Nolan too, with his obsession for manipulating time and space, out of which springs the confusing ‘Tenet’.

A TANGLE OF STORIES

Reduced to a few sentences, the fairy tale is the story of the youngest son of a king who, after his elder brothers have failed, sets out on the journey of his life towards the palace of his uncle, the Green Emperor. The point of the adventure is to take over the succession and the throne. Along the way the hero runs into formidable obstacles and enemies, such as Omul Spân and the Red Emperor. But he also gets fantastic allies who will help him through every hardship. I made it sound like an IMDb synopsis for a reason.

Even a quick reading shows that the story runs in one direction only, following a single narrative thread and a single protagonist from start to finish. It fits the mould of the simple, linear story. That kind of tale focuses on one hero chasing one desire with dogged persistence. The audience watches him struggle to get what he wants, and by the end he has been radically changed. The reason this shape is the one Hollywood studios like best is precisely the one I gave above.

I said naturalness is the most important feature of a story, because it captures the organic way a narrative unfolds (or flows). John Truby says that all you need to do to get to grips with it is look around you, at nature. Nature is forever uniting the elements it is made of into new sequences. The writer need only steal those patterns and apply them to the structure of his story. A few examples:

Meandering story (I'll call it the winding story) follows a serpentine path with, apparently, no fixed destination.

Its obvious equivalent in nature is the river, and the most pertinent example of such a narrative is 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. In Mark Twain's novel the protagonist sets off down the Mississippi.

Spiral story (the spiralling story) is the kind of narrative in which the hero keeps returning to a central event (or memory) and relives it at progressively deeper intensities. In nature you find that pattern in tornadoes, and my examples would be thrillers such as Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' or Christopher Nolan's 'Memento'.

“situations entertain us; stories entertain and teach what it means to be human” us

Truby points out that the idea of chopping a story into three parts comes from the conventions of traditional theatre, where the curtain falls after every act so the next set can be prepared or the time and space between scenes marked out.

He regards that division as a superficial, mechanical device forced on to the story, with no connection to the narrative's internal logic. A story is a living organism in constant development, and it has to follow its own natural course rather than a simplistic, pre-set skeleton.

He compares the story to an athlete in competition: to the spectators, what the athlete does looks effortless. It is as though the body simply moves that way by nature, without the slightest exertion. In fact, he has mastered the technique of his sport so thoroughly that it has become invisible to the onlookers. All they can see is the beauty and the fluidity of the movement.

That is how an experienced storyteller has to work too (whether the medium is a film, a book, a play or even a video game): build and connect a run of moments so intense and so emotionally loaded that the listener or viewer feels as if they are living them at first hand. A good storyteller doesn't tell the audience what happened in someone's life; he makes them live that life outright, and hands them the experience of it. The storyteller does not lay out a string of situations with no organic succession, does not complete and create interruptions. Instead he unwinds before us a tangled skein of story that reads as a whole. This is what K. M. Weiland teaches us too, in 'Creating Character Arcs': 'situations entertain us; stories entertain and teach us what it means to be human'.

TRUBY ALLTHE

Writer and screenwriter John Truby is one of the most respected and sought-after consultants in the film industry of the past three decades, having helped refine more than 1,000 screenplays.

Truby does not care for Syd Field's three-act paradigm (valid only for film narrative, not for other literary works), which holds that every screenplay divides up like this: the beginning (25% of the story), the middle part (50% of the story) and the end (the remaining 25% of the story). According to Field, the three-act story has three 'plot points'.

The first sits at the end of the first quarter of the narrative and is the disturbance that unbalances the existing equilibrium and shoves the hero into his journey. The second plot point comes at the end of the first half of the story and marks the moment when the hero grasps his condition, his weaknesses and his priorities, and takes radical decisions about change. The last one lands after the first three quarters of the action, when the final confrontation happens and a new equilibrium is established.

Carried along by that train of thought, I stopped at an idea that struck me as brighter than the rest: do Creangă's stories really obey the rules of structure that John Truby and others call essential to making a good story? Does the writer follow the 22 essential steps of a master storyteller, as set out in 'The Anatomy of Story'?

Given the purely Romanian theme that the second issue of NEXT LEVEL was supposed to have, I thought I'd tie the article to my passion for fantasy, D&D and pen-and-paper RPGs. So I'll put 'Povestea lui Harap-Alb' under the microscope – a classic of Romanian literature, with fantastic elements drawn from folklore. I should also apologise for the possibly excessive use of English words and expressions, but translating them into Romanian would blunt and distort their meaning. And a warning: the article contains MAJOR SPOILERS for that story… so get your hands on the book and read it first, and spare me the complaints that I robbed you of a good Mioritic read.

THE LION AND

Recently, browsing in a bookshop, my eye was caught by Tolstoy's debut works:

'Childhood', 'Boyhood' and 'Youth'. I bought them, and once I'd read them I couldn't help thinking of our own Romanian author, who in turn set down a few of his childhood and youth experiences.

Yes, I'm talking about Ion Creangă. Tolstoy's works reach a higher degree of moral depth than Creangă's, but it was impossible not to notice the similarities. Both write about relationships and attitudes towards teachers, parents, home and playmates. Both Tolstoy and Creangă describe the deep, unfamiliar feelings that come over them in the first years of life: love, hate, anger, tenderness, shame and other new stirrings rising from who knows which corner of their inexperienced child's souls. In both cases the swirl of emotion that churns their hearts builds new inner universes and puts down moral foundations around which the whole of their lives will revolve.

That chain of events and resemblances set off a chain reaction in my thinking: was Tolstoy a source of inspiration for Creangă, who wrote his recollections some 20 years later? Did Nică find the Russian writer's approach rather inaccessible and try for a more digestible version? Did the two gifted writers obey certain technical rules as they composed, or were they simply carried along by the creative wave?

In the first issue of NEXT LEVEL I told you about my obsession with film and cinema. This time I get the chance to confess that the ailment I described (and suffer from) is a natural consequence. A complication, if you like, of another condition that hit me hard in my earliest childhood.

That curse landed on my head the moment I could decipher – and it made me feel like a shy Champollion under the tyranny of teachers who held forth from 'the top of the pyramids' through two communist decades. They loaded me with the mysteries of strange symbols, and I remember very clearly how they smudged my little Disney books, full of illustrations from 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' or 'Aladdin'.

From that moment a new world opened in front of my eyes. I was like Neo, seeing the Matrix in its raw form – reading the codes and equations behind the images, in moments when 'the veil that blinded me to the truth' had been lifted. That was when I discovered that behind those images there was a story, with characters and a plot. And the virus caught me in its grip and ate my time and my life… even today I haven't found a cure.

I became obsessed with stories and, in a period without computers, without internet and with only one television channel, I read everything that fell into my hands and that I could understand. I grew so passionate about it that I started writing my own stories and even produced a novel of “Tolkienesque-Warcraftian” inspiration. A few years after finishing the latter, finding myself in possession of a new set of storytelling know-how (picked up by studying the work of theorists such as Aristotle, Syd Field, John Truby or K.M. Weiland), I made a more thorough study of the work and reached the conclusion that it belonged to a dilettante. So I burned it.

Leafing recently through John Truby's book, “The Anatomy of Story – 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller”, the idea behind this article sprang to mind. And in the lines that follow I'll tell you what it's all about.

“grindCultural Collection” articles

ANATOMY

STORIES

The “grind cultural” articles collection

OF A Ion STORIES Creangă ANATOMY

Silviu Raban