Yet, despite our limiting attention spans and hyper activity – books remain and writers still write.
On the 24th of May at the Kingsmead book fair in Johannesburg, the multi- award winning Israeli novelist Shifra Horn shed some light on why and how she continues to write.
Jokingly, Shifra says that writing stops her from seeing a psychologist. But inherently, Shifra says that the act of writing and reading a book gives you perspective on your life – allowing you the time and space to digest your own lived experience via story. Shifra draws her inspiration from being an ardent lifetime student of Hebrew and the Bible. Shifra’s legacy includes a dynamic collection of both fiction and non-fiction but has recently begun exploring the delicate art of writing children’s books. “It’s like eating sorbet after a heavy meal” Shifra says smiling - contentedly.
A large part of why Shifra writes is hidden within how she writes. It’s about solving a riddle – putting together the pieces to present you a whole – it’s to uncover a particular message. “I begin writing from the senses. I focus on a smell, or a sound or a particular sight and grow the story from there”. Shifra writes intuitively, allowing her imagination to create bits of chapters, endings and beginnings before stitching it all together into one coherent story. According to how Shifra writes, writing is about making sense of the world.
Why we write also has to do with what we write. Shifra’s modus operandi is fiction writing and says that fiction can sometimes present you with a better representation of the truth than non-fiction can. Where non-fiction can sometimes distance a reader emotionally by the hard cold nature of factual recall – fiction encourages the reader to believe and feel from the depths of their imagination, their lived experience – from the depths of their own personal truth.
We are homofabula; meaning half human, half story. The power of writing allows us to connect the two halves. In South Africa where our national identity is threatened by the diaspora of dialect, class and culture, Shifra believes that the power of story is the only thing that will, and can, bind us all. Having her novels successfully translated into eight international languages – this is particularly true. For the writer and the reader, even though we’re distracted by cheap and quick stories fed to us by the information age, books will never stop being written and should never stop being read so long as we call ourselves human.
