Writing in English - or any language that is not your mother tongue - is a peculiar thing

Writing in English - or any language that is not your mother tongue - is a peculiar thing. Today I want to share this feeling with you. And to do that, we need to talk about writing in your Muttersprache first (which is Hebrew for me), to discuss writing that comes naturally to you.

Virginia Woolf called it "The Wave in the Mind": The internal rhythm that a writer develops with time and with writing. After eleven years of writing for the general public in my home country and in my own language I'm starting to feel it. Or something akin to it. When I began working at the National Library of Israel as a writer and editor, I felt that writing an article was like solving a huge puzzle - making sure that the different pieces, the words but even more so the sentences, all fall in their right place so they would form a paragraph, which would be followed by another paragraph and another until the big picture was revealed.

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Over time the feeling, and the metaphor that captures it, changed. Writing in Hebrew today feels to me like directing the flow of a river. Just as "there are no small parts only small actors", I find it hard to believe that there is a text that is too long. If the readers lose you before you've completed the movement you set out to complete (like in music) then it's because you didn't guide them on smoothly from sentence to sentence and now they're stuck somewhere, baffled and bored by their lack of understanding.

I feel the direction of the river, the wave in the mind, when I write in Hebrew. But recently I've moved more and more to writing in English, and there (here) I concentrate much more on making sure that the puzzle is organized in terms of the placement of the various pieces. In English the waters are still rough. So it is really humbling for you to stay with me here while I’m splashing and trashing around.

Recently I came across a great writing tip. To copy, by hand, the writing of the writers you want to learn from. Beyond recognizing and breaking down tricks and writing strategies, in the act of manual writing – copying by hand - you assimilate the words of the writers you admire and, probably above all, their rhythms. For us, the sophisticated modern writers who love to speak about originally and the expression of one's own unique soul, it may sound ridiculous and technical, but this is very similar to how many past writers taught themselves to write. And I'm not just thinking of the famous example of Hunter Thompson typing the novels of Scott F. Fitzgerald so he could write like the great novelist. Writers, and literate people more generally, learned by recitation and by copying.

In the platonic dialogue named "Phaedrus" Socrates tells the legend of the arrival of writing to Egypt. According to his story, the Egyptian god Thoth tells King Thamus of his new invention. But although the god of art presents writing as a gift to the people of Egypt, and puts the King in charge of dispersing it, King Thamus is hesitant.

The god tells the king: "Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories. My discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom."

The king goes on to argue that what the god of art brought with his is a great danger, "a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows."

This fascinating legend is Socrates' way (and Plato's) of mourning the loss of the splendid memory that the Greeks had before the technique of writing arrived on their shores, but while the prediction itself was correct, the time line was a bit off. The art of recitation and of recalling did not disappear from the world when writing was introduced to the Greeks, not by a long shot. Nor was the faculty of memory – the one Plato was discussing in the dialogue. Even in Israel, until a generation or two ago, it was customary in public schools to learn the Bible by reciting and memorizing significant portions of it. When my generation reached school (I'm 35 years old), this method was already called "memorizing like a parrot". and so while the entire educational system was geared towards coaxing us—and coaxing everyone who came after us—into memorizing material and regurgitating it during tests, the recitation of literary texts faded. Not just the Bible, but poems also.

How strange. Reciting answers in history class instead of teaching historical thinking is all fine and dandy. Memorizing literary works and thus assimilating them into your heart - as we do with the words of our favorite songs - is seen as no longer suitable.

And so my question to you is: who are the writers you think you'll benefit from copying and reciting? Please do take the time to answer, I want to copy what you say…