Belief is the Foundation of Creating the World of Story

According to Iran Book News Agency (IBNA), the third session of the Khatam (PBUH) Story Writing Workshop, taught by Ali Arsanjani, writer and lecturer of fictional literature, was held on Saturday, November 8, 2025, at the House of Book and Literature of Iran’s Writers’ Forum. This educational workshop, organized within the framework of the promotional programs of the Khatam (PBUH) Festival, was dedicated to topics such as the nature of “belief” and its role in character creation, critique and analysis of plot in religious stories, as well as the subtleties of point of view and the economy of words.

Ali Arsanjani, at the beginning of this session and after reading one of the selected stories from previous periods of the Khatam Festival, took a fundamental look at the concept of “belief” and offered a new definition of this concept. He stated to the participants: There is no such thing as superstition; human beliefs are endless, and no belief disappears, only its form changes.

This story writing lecturer, by likening beliefs to the principle of conservation of matter in physics, explained: Humans throughout history have been believing beings, and these beliefs, from the worship of idols to a liking for sports stars and investing in luxury brands, has always been flowing. Humans live by their beliefs. If you take these beliefs from them, nothing but emptiness remains; therefore, for a writer to create believable characters, this intellectual infrastructure must be understood.

Arsanjani, in a part of the workshop, dissected “character” as the main pillar of the story.

He considered character as a collection of inner layers (motivations, fears, beliefs, and conflicts) and outer layers (behaviors, speech, and actions) and added: A character must be alive, make mistakes, doubt, make decisions, and ultimately shape the story’s path; the writer should not create the character as a simple symbol or type.

This workshop instructor stated the principle of characterization as “the character being placed at crossroads” and explained: Crossroads make every story beautiful, and a character comes to life when their decisions spring from their internal logic and define their path when faced with difficult choices.

Arsanjani, in another part of his speech, explained the position of story and story reading and said: Writers and those who read stories are one step superior to other humans, because story affects the realm of thought and influences the mind forever. Our life is limited, and we cannot see everything closely, but the structure of the human mind is abstract and can live through stories in the world of Marquez, Virginia Woolf, or a thousand years ago in Iranian history; this is the greatest pleasure and most effective method of education.

The middle and practical part of this workshop was dedicated to the critique and review of the story “The Irregular Mark on the Snow” written by Mohammadali Rokni, the first place winner of the second Khatam Festival. Arsanjani in this section, referring to strengths such as sweet narrative language, addressed technical points open to criticism and considered the error in point of view as one of the flaws of this story.

Discussions related to plot and especially endings formed part of the critique of this story.

Arsanjani, by likening the plot to “a car engine consisting of thousands of interconnected gears,” considered the ending of the story “The Irregular Mark on the Snow” as its main weakness and said: An open ending does not mean that we abandon the story; a skilled and powerful writer knows how to bring all events to a logical and convincing conclusion, as we see in the best of stories in the Quran.

This story writing lecturer further emphasized the economy of words and the necessity of avoiding verbosity and non-functional characters and said: In a short story, every word is like capital, and the writer must ask themselves if the presence of this character or scene is necessary for the story’s progression? Additional characters only distract the reader’s mind and reduce the focus of the work.

Arsanjani, in his final summary, once again emphasized the centrality of “belief” in the process of story creation and said: To write a story, especially in the realm of religious story, one must know human beings and their world of beliefs; a successful writer is one who can display these beliefs in the form of living characters and coherent plots, without falling into the realm of slogans and clichés.

The Khatam (PBUH) Story Writing Workshop is part of the series of programs of the Khatam Festival which is held with the aim of promoting prophetic culture and tradition through the creation of original fictional works.