Sometimes, when I choose a book to read, I find myself reading it from beginning to end. I check what's written on the last page and decide based on that whether the story interests me or not.
Besides spoiling the suspense for myself - most of the time I'm wrong.
A book that I thought I wouldn't like, because its ending didn't excite my imagination - it's the one I'm reading word for word and anxiously awaiting the sequel.
A book that I was sure would be my heart's desire, is not like that in the end.
I often whisper to myself: Don't read the story from the end, read it from the beginning.
When you read from the beginning, you know exactly what happened, what was going on, how the epidemic broke out or how the accident occurred.
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In life, we often read the story from the end. From what our friend tells us, what we heard from our friend, what we heard from his friend. Or from the news we heard on the radio and were sure that what we heard was the whole story.
Soldier Elor Azaria has been standing on the theater stage for almost six months. We all know why he is there, just from what is presented before us. Can we judge and truly know what happened before? What was he thinking when he stood there in front of the terrorist? What did he feel? Why did he do what he did? – we will not know the beginning. But we know perfectly well the continuation, the end, which they never stop telling us.
This is the end, which does not always correspond to and point to what happened at the beginning.
Commissioner Roni Alsheich's comments about the Ethiopians caused harsh criticism and an outburst of rants against him. You can't see the forest for the trees. With so much talk, the first words were forgotten. Who knows what he really said? No one. That was at the beginning.
In my lectures on literature, when I teach how to write a story, I focus on the body of the story, its structure and composition. I ask the audience to identify with me the beginning, the middle and the end of the story.
A story that is not precisely constructed may be at risk of sinning against its narrative truth. Without an initial introduction to the conflict that takes place in the first act, we will not be able to reach the resolution of the conflict at the end of the story.
If in a fictional story, there is no story without the continuation being connected to the beginning by every thread in which it is woven, in reality this should be much stronger and clearer.
But we, unfortunately, like to cut the umbilical cord too early and let things continue, without delving too deeply into their beginning.
Oh, how small we are.
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