PraxisPoetica II Essential Writing Process

Nov 24, 2025 - 14 min read - 2900 words

v. o. kapelman

Author of `Denying The Amerikan Dream. Wandering into the Promised Land`

PraxisPoetica II Essential Writing Process

Intro

👉 If you have no idea of what Dialectics is, and you’ve never heard of Dialectical Materialism or Historical Materialism, well, it’s time you did. It certainly fits into the “drop everything you’re doing and do that now” category. Here’s a ten-minute course made up of 11 sentences that you can take right now, prepared just for you in Brussels, Belgium by Karl Marx in 1845: Theses On Feuerbach by Karl Marx. I’m going to give it a quick read right now to make sure I know what I’m talking about. It certainly puts the praxis into our PraxisPoetica.

Read it? What ya think?

Love that eleventh sentence:

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

And the tenth isn’t bad either:

The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society or social humanity.

Pantsers, Plotters, Plantsers and Lajos Egri Dialectics

• See Pantser, Plotter, and Plantser: The 3 Dominant Types of Writers as a starting point. Now, we’re going to go beyond that, to the question of praxis, with Lajos Egri Dialectics.

Everyone is always telling me, and in a way they’re right, to just sit down and finish the… book.

In a way, they’re right.

But all authors, whether they like it or not, and whether they know it or not, have adopted some kind of hegemony driven manual (right, documentation site in the brain). “Common sense” as Mr. Paine used to refer to this; or anti-hegemony. All of us are executing some kind of a plan; in poetic praxis.

The one their teachers taught them.

We all have teachers. You get up in the morning and want to make French Toast. You were not born with any bullshit “innate knowledge” (sorry Mr. Chomsky) about anything. Everything you are told by reductionists as being innate is actually what you were taught by the world you were born into, historically, over learn, work, time, so life; and through acquiring some kind of consciousness via the learn and work you have done (even making the bed), class consciousness acquired in class struggle or the lack thereof; choices we have been making, you, me, all of us, every minute of every waking (or not so much) day. We have acquired the consciousness resulting in the praxis of being put to work, then working, almost all of us. Or exploiting others.

I think I’m making myself clear: all of us have a plan on all levels. No-one has ever written a novel without teachers. For Robert Louis Stevenson writing the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde:

Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson’s stepson, wrote: “I don’t believe that there was ever such a literary feat before as the writing of Dr Jekyll. I remember the first reading as though it were yesterday. Louis came downstairs in a fever; read nearly half the book aloud; and then, while we were still gasping, he was away again, and busy writing. I doubt if the first draft took so long as three days.”

As was customary, Mrs. Stevenson would read the draft and offer her criticisms in the margins. Robert was confined to bed at the time from a haemorrhage. In her comments in the manuscript, she observed that in effect the story was really an allegory, but Robert was writing it as a story. After a while, Robert called her back into the bedroom and pointed to a pile of ashes: he had burnt the manuscript in fear that he would try to salvage it, and thus forced himself to start again from nothing, writing an allegorical story as she had suggested. Scholars debate whether he really burnt his manuscript; there is no direct factual evidence for the burning, but it remains an integral part of the history of the novella. In another version of the story, Stevenson came downstairs to read the manuscript for his wife and stepson. Enraged by his wife’s criticism, he went back to his room, only to come back later admitting she was right. He then threw the original draft into the fire, and stopped his wife and stepson from rescuing it.

Stevenson rewrote the story in three to six days. A number of later biographers have alleged that Stevenson was on drugs during the frantic re-write: for example, William Gray’s revisionist history A Literary Life (2004) said he used cocaine, while other biographers said he used ergot. However, the standard history, according to the accounts of his wife and son (and himself), says he was bed-ridden and sick while writing it. According to Osbourne, “The mere physical feat was tremendous, and, instead of harming him, it roused and cheered him inexpressibly”. He continued to refine the work for four to six weeks after the initial revision.

OK, so everyone has a plan. A praxis in the midst of this continually in movement material in constant change including growth and destruction. On many levels, each with their own form of movement governed by their own laws of movement and change. Thank you Lenin, Marx and Engels, Hegel, etc., all the way back to Heraclitus with his stick in the muddy river:

The central ideas of Heraclitus’s philosophy are the unity of opposites and the concept of change. Heraclitus saw harmony and justice in strife. He viewed the world as constantly in flux, always “becoming” but never “being”. He expressed this in sayings like “Everything flows” (Greek: πάντα ῥεῖ, panta rhei) and “No man ever steps in the same river twice”. This insistence upon change contrasts with that of the ancient philosopher Parmenides, who believed in a reality of static “being”. —Wikipedia Heraclitus

But Lajos Egri is one of the few among real writers talking about the writing process to come out and say it plain. He actually mentions the word. Not only mentions it, but explains it, fundamentally, and then with a host of craft examples. I’m finally here, in writing and publishing, thanks to the relief and road to action born in understanding his words: starting as chapter titles: The Dialectical Approach (ch. I.3); Unity of Opposites (ch. I.11; Movement (ch. II.6); Transition (ch. II.9)) and continuing as part and parcel of the entire text.

What is Dialectics? The word comes to us from the old Greeks… in Plato’s Dialogues… Socrates discovers truth by this process: he states a proposition, finds a contradiction to it, and, correcting it in the light of this contradiction, finds a new contradiction. This continues indefinitely. Movement of the conversation is secured by three steps. First, statement of the proposition, called thesis. Then the discovery of a contradiction to this proposition, called antithesis, being the opposite of the original proposition. Now, resolution of this contradiction necessitates correction of the original proposition, and formulation of a third proposition, the synthesis, being the combination of the original proposition and the contradiction to it.

Then Egri takes one of these leaps right then and there, here and now, describing in three paragrahs a Marxist history of civilization as well as a Marxist definition of the human being entwined in the class struggle of their epoch; that is, the basis of life, of literature, of very material existence; certainly of writing:

These three steps—thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—are the law of all movement. Everything that moves constantly negates itself. All things change toward their opposites through movement. The present becomes the past, the future becomes the present. There is nothing which does not move.

Constant change is the very essence of all existence. Everything in time passes into its opposite. Everything within itself contains its own opposite. Change is a force which impels it to move, and this very movement becomes something different from what it was. The past becomes the present and both determine the future. New life arises from the old, and this new life is the combination of the old with the contradiction which has destroyed it. This contradiction that causes the change goes on forever.

A human being is a maze of seeming contradictions. Planning one thing, he at once does another; loving, he believes he hates. Man oppressed, humiliated, beaten, still professes sympathy and understanding for those who have beaten, humiliated, and oppressed him.

Then he even gives us some great ideas for novels (already used but yours will be original!) as examples of this “riddle, part of the so-called ‘mystery of life’”:

How can we explain these contradictions?

Why does the man you befriend turn against you? Why does son turn against father, daughter against mother?

A boy runs away from home because his mother insists that he sweep their dingy, two-room apartment. He hates sweeping. But he is quite content with a job as assistant janitor in a big house—his main function being to sweep the halls and street. Why?

A twelve-year-old girl marries a fifty-year-old man—and is sincerely happy. A thief becomes a worthy citizen, a wealthy gentleman becomes a thief. The daughter of a respectable and religious family crashes into the underworld and prostitution. Why?

On the surface, these examples are part of a riddle. But they can be explained, dialectically. It is a Herculean task, but not an impossible one if we remember that without contradiction there would be no motion and no life. Without contradiction there would be no universe. Stars, moon, earth would not exist—nor would we. Hegel said: “It is only because a thing contains a contradiction within itself that it moves and acquires impulse and activity. That is the process of all motion and all development.”

Yeah! If you feel inspired and shut this page right now for a bit and get down to dreaming and spilling onto paper the spark of a story of your own, go right ahead, I won’t mind. In fact, if you feel that way, you’ve really understood exactly what I’m blabbering about. That dialectics and class struggle is at the heart of writing, whoever you are.

(I use Obsidian for my writing process, and VSCode for publishing this online, but that’s going to be covered in another note, after I’ve finished publishing the Community Edition of my first novel, yes.)

In explanation, Egri also cites the Russian revolutionary, Soviet historian, academic and Marxist philosopher. Adoratsky, in his work Dialectics:

The general laws of dialectics are universal: they are to be found in the movement and development of the immeasurable, vast, luminous nebulae from which in the spaces of the universe the stellar systems are formed… in the internal structure of molecules and atoms and in the movement of electrons and protons.

Zeno, in the fifth century B.C., was father of dialectics. Adoratsky quotes Zeno’s demonstrations:

An arrow, in the course of its flight, is bound to be at some definite point of its path and occupy some definite place. If that be so, then at each given moment it is at a definite point in a state of rest, that is, motionless; hence, it is not moving at all. We therefore see that motion cannot be expressed without resorting to contradictory statements. The arrow is at a given place, yet at the same time is not in that place. It is only by expressing both these contradictory affirmations coincidentally that we can depict motion.

Anyway, I could go on quoting the whole chapter, the whole book for that matter, but I think I’ve explained how well-formed I feel as this is an enabling essential part and parcel of my writing process, and how you could do a lot worse than reviewing it in this series of notes I’m publishing on this site in parallel with the serialization of my first novel.

I’m not going to get into how I got the sense kicked into me to listen to the man and adopt, finally, his great teachings. Thanks to which I’m finally getting Wandering Into The Promised Land into your hands, Community Edition, free to read online. I prefer to “finish the book”. Then I’ll tell the story of the last three, or thirty, or sixty years, of my life, actually, in search of PraxisPoetica; I’ll tell that in later notes. That’s a promise. My first novel will actually be finished on this website by then, and no-one might read them, but it’ll serve me as a streamlined guide for my next, second novel. And that’s a promise.

I swear I don’t even remember now how I came across for the first time The Art of Dramatic Writing, and subsequently its dusting off and useful overt adaptation to include the novel (without changing anything at all, of course, Ibsen’s the man) in The Art of Creative Writing.

But they’ve been on my drive ever since.

The Novel Writing Process I’ve Actually Adopted in a Nutshell

Egri explains, in true Plantser fashion, and I have adopted, 14 steps to writing a novel:

APPENDIX I

The Basic Principles of Writing

It is imperative that every type of writing should contain the following:

- Premise
- Pivotal character or characters
- Character (three-dimensional)
- Unity of opposites
- Growth
- Orchestration
- Point of attack
- Conflict
- Transition
- Crisis
- Climax
- Resolution

These twelve parts are as indispensable in writing as are the vital organs to the human body.

—op. cit. The Art of Creative Writing

And just like the human body, and everything else including software development, these are iterative and incremental steps, large and small, all essential. Please read this brilliant article by that genius of the Agile Software development process, Mike Cohn: Iterative vs. Incremental Development: Why Agile Teams Need Both

The next dozen notes or so will present each iterative and incremental step of the way, in parallel, as I say, with the writing, revision and publishing in serial form of my first novel.

Conclusion

It’s just that I’ve seen how countless craft experts (and so they are!) are actually copying straight from him (Egri was very successful in writing plays and scripts, yes, and in Hollywood too; his star pupil was Woody Allen).

Woody Allen was a great admirer of his books. “I still think his The Art of Dramatic Writing is the most stimulating and best book on the subject ever written, and I have them all,” Allen told biographer Eric Lax.[6] —Wikipedia, op. cit

This is why successful and actually highly useful and practical “How to write a novel” books like Lisa Cron’s Story Genius practically copy him word for word (everything starts with premise and the what if?; you write the book, and indeed, every scene, to prove your premise (point); protagonist backstory and origin scene(s) leading up to inciting incident opening scene; writing that first and the ending scenes before you do anything else; and see Egri’s Ch. IV.9.On Genius…).

It’s all good. Just a shame they don’t include Lajos Egri in the bibliography. But it may not be their fault: the books and workshops they learned everything from probably didn’t mention him either.

So, the next 10 or so of these notes will be how I assumed in actual praxis the process, step by step, as I put up, in parallel, the novel itself.

Outro

Oh, one more thing before I go for this note: Richard Wright (author of Native Son) has been equally instrumental for me in his short but dynamite text Blueprint for Negro Writing:

Somewhere in his writings Lenin makes the observation that oppressed minorities often reflect the techniques of the bourgeoisie more brilliantly than some sections of the bourgeoisie themselves. The psychological importance of this becomes evident when one recalls that Oppressed minorities, and especially petty bourgeois sections of oppressed Minorities, strive to assimilate the virtues of the bourgeoisie in the Assumption that by doing so, they can lift themselves into a higher social Sphere. But not only among the oppressed petty bourgeoisie does this occur.

The workers of a minority people also strive to forge organizational forms of struggle to better their lot and they manifest the same restlessness. Lacking the handicaps of false ambition and property, they have access to a wide social vision and a deep social consciousness. They display a greater freedom and initiative in pushing their claims upon civilization than even the petty bourgeoisie. Their organizations show greater strength, adaptability, and efficiency than any other group in society.

That Negro workers have demonstrated this consciousness and mobility for political and economic action there can be no doubt. But has this consciousness been reflected in the work of Negro writers? Has it been manifested in Negro writing in the same degree as it has been in the Negro workers’ struggle to free the Scottsboro boys, in the struggle to free Herndon in the fight against lynching? Have they as creative writers taken advantage of their unique minority position? The answer decidedly is no. Negro writers have lagged sadly, and the gap between the militant Negro workers and the Negro writers widens relentlessly.

So, how are we doing as Jews on this? We have many in the streets all over the world, including in Palestine, struggling for a new world based on social bases without exploitation or war or genocide; and we certainly have a bunch of writers. We’ll delve into this in a later note, after I’ve published my contribution, Wandering Into The Promised Land, right here on this site.

Tags:

• PraxisPoetica

Note Series on PraxisPoetica for Wandering Into The Promised Land

PraxisPoetica I Writing and Publishing Process