How Is a Story Born?

A Glimpse into the World Behind My Books

By Nurit Rozenblat

So how is a story actually born?

I think a story begins long before the first word is written. It begins at the moment when we manage to detach a little from the reality around us and allow our thoughts to wander to another place. A place where there are no fixed rules, no clear boundaries, and everything we are able to imagine can exist.

Imagination is, in my eyes, one of the most wondrous abilities we have. Through it we can create endless worlds, characters, and forms, give them colors and voices, change them, take them apart, and build them anew.

We can move between times, reach places that never existed, and meet characters who were born solely from our thoughts.

And the more we allow the imagination to develop, the more we discover how far it can take us.

Sometimes I feel that the more active my imagination is, the more my feet lift slightly off the ground. I am here, inside everyday reality, but part of my thoughts is already traveling somewhere else entirely.

Perhaps that is also why I need a great deal of time with myself.

Not out of a wish to distance myself from people, but out of a need to be alone with my thoughts. In that quiet I can listen to the characters taking shape inside me, observe the places the imagination builds, and let ideas develop undisturbed.

There are journeys one can take with other people, and there are journeys one can take only within our own consciousness.

For me, writing begins with those journeys.

When Imagination Becomes a Story

I don't always know in advance where the story will lead me.

Sometimes a small idea grows into an entire world. One character raises a question, the question leads to an encounter, and the encounter opens a possibility I hadn't thought of before.

There is a stage in writing that I especially love. The stage when I no longer feel that I am inventing the story, but discovering it.

At first I am the one who decides where the character will go, whom she will meet, and what she will say. But the deeper I go into the world I created, the character receives a character of her own. I begin to know her fears, her desires, and the way she thinks.

And sometimes I plan for her to turn in one direction, but when I reach that moment in the writing, I realize that she actually needs to choose another way.

Not because the character really acts without me, but because inside my imagination she has already become a whole person, with an internal logic of his own.

These thoughts keep accompanying me even when I am not writing.

I can go out for a walk, sit facing the sea, or simply be in quiet, and suddenly find a solution to a scene that had occupied me the day before.

As if the story continues to be written somewhere inside me, even when the computer is closed.

How Does One Invite the Reader to Enter a World That Does Not Exist?

Creating a world in one's imagination and writing it so that another person can enter it are two different things.

When I write, I need to remember that the reader does not see what I see. He does not know the characters the way I know them, and he has not wandered through the places I have already visited hundreds of times in my mind.

That is why it is important for me to leave him points to hold on to.

A feeling he knows. A fear he can understand. A question he too has asked himself. Something familiar he can hold onto while I invite him to move away from reality.

Because if I take him too far, too fast, he may get lost.

I want the reader to be able to fly with me in imagination, but also to feel safe enough to continue on the journey.

That is one of the reasons I love to include illustrations in my stories.

We are used to thinking of illustrations as something that belongs mainly to children's books, but in my eyes adults can also benefit from them. A single image can open a door to a world that is not always easy to describe in words.

The illustration is not meant to replace the reader's imagination, but to awaken it.

And I think that here one of the most beautiful things in literature takes place.

The writer creates one world, but every reader builds it anew in his own consciousness. The same words can awaken entirely different images, feelings, and experiences in different people.

Between Imaginary Worlds and Life Itself

I love the possibility of creating a reality that has no boundaries.

A world in which time can receive a voice, memory can become an entity, and love can be something one can meet and ask questions of.

But I love no less to observe ordinary life and discover how amusing it can be.

Sometimes a story is born from a philosophical question that has accompanied me for years. And sometimes it begins from a small everyday moment, one we all know, but when we look at it from another angle it becomes an entire comedy.

That is how two very different worlds were born for me.

In ״The Journey to Eternity״ I wanted to let my imagination reach places that cannot be reached in reality. To imagine encounters with entities, to ask questions about creation, about time, about memory, about love, and about the meaning of life.

I did not want to write a book that provides answers to everything. I wanted to write a book that dares to ask.

In contrast, in ״A Day in Menopause״ I wanted to take a human, familiar experience, with all the embarrassment, the changes, and the surprises in it, and look at it with humor.

Because laughter, too, requires imagination.

Sometimes one need only take a small moment from life, enlarge it a little, and discover how funny it is when we manage to look at ourselves from the outside.

The two books are different from each other in almost everything, but as far as I am concerned they were born from the same place: my curiosity about life and the wish to see beyond what is right in front of my eyes.

And What Does Writing Reveal to Me About Myself?

One of the things that surprised me is that not all the questions I put into a story were born especially for it.

Some of them have accompanied me for years.

What is the meaning of the time we are given? Why do we hold onto certain memories? Can love exist without fear of loss? And what would we choose to do if we knew our lives would never end?

These are questions to which I have no absolute answers.

And perhaps precisely because of that, I love writing about them.

Through the story I can observe them from different angles, give them shape and voice, and allow my characters to contend with them.

And in the same measure, writing also allows me to laugh at life.

At the moments when we plan one thing and exactly the opposite happens. At the gap between what we think we control and what reality decides to do.

I discover that the imagination does not only distance me from life. Sometimes it actually helps me understand it better.

And What Happens When the Book Ends?

There is a certain difficulty in finishing a story.

As long as I am writing, the world I created is still open. I can return to it, change something, add an encounter, or discover a new possibility.

But there comes a moment when one must decide that the journey is complete.

That does not mean I have run out of ideas. On the contrary. Sometimes precisely at the end of the writing I discover how many more ways I could have chosen.

And nevertheless, one must know how to let go.

Because from the moment the book reaches the reader, it no longer belongs only to my imagination.

The reader brings with him his own memories, his own fears, his own experiences, and the questions he carries within him.

He may love a character I did not think would be central, laugh at a sentence I almost deleted, or find meaning in a place where I myself saw something entirely different.

And I think there is enormous beauty in that.

I believe that not all of us give our imagination the same place in our lives. There are people whose thoughts are occupied almost without pause by tasks, by work, and by the routine of the day, and they don't always have time left to let their consciousness wander.

Precisely for them, a book can be a wonderful invitation to set out on a journey.

There is no need to buy a plane ticket, pack a suitcase, or leave the house. One need only open a book and agree, for a while, to enter another reality.

Sometimes that journey gives us rest from the world around us. Sometimes it awakens new thoughts in us, and sometimes it simply lets us laugh at something that until a moment ago seemed frustrating to us.

And I especially love the moment when the book closes, but the story continues to live within us.

When we walk down the street and suddenly remember a character. When we do some everyday action and find ourselves returning in our thoughts to a place we read about. When a question that arose in the story continues to accompany us long after we have finished reading.

For me, that is the moment when a story has truly succeeded in touching the reader.

Because it is no longer found only between the pages of the book.

It has become a small part of his inner world.

So how is a story born?

For me, it is born out of quiet, out of thought, out of hours of aloneness that I choose, and out of the willingness to step away for a moment from the familiar world.

It is born when I allow myself to imagine without immediately asking whether the thing is possible, logical, or even realistic.

And only afterward, when I begin to write, do I look for the way to turn everything I saw in my imagination into words through which another person can also see.

Perhaps that is why I love writing so much.

Because every time I create a story, I do not only create a new world for myself.

I open a door to it, and invite someone else to enter.

And if one of my two books succeeds in taking you for a moment to another place — whether to a journey to the secrets of creation or to a small laugh at life itself — as far as I am concerned, the imagination has already done its part.

With love, Nurit Rozenblat / OrOrgani

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