way in dealing with unhealthy amounts of spare time. Seems like, my innate laziness prevents my grabbing anything weightier than a quill.
And it is when we, at long last, arrive to the final question concerning the subject in hand. (If you still follow.)
How to write?
The question is too abysmal to answer it before the upcoming blackout (because of the blockade which we’re living thru here the electricity is supplied in rational 3-hour fragments to make the endemic life-style as harmonized as possible). For which obvious reason I’m gonna consider the question under the next heading in this here preface under the cloak of a dissertation.
e. The awl pricks out of the knapsack for all to see!
We are a mighty enviable crowd. Look around to get proud what an unparalleled stretch of time we‘re living thru and recollect the verse from the high school curriculum: “Happy are they whose lot it is to visit this world on its fateful days…”, and so on because no one remembers the following lines even less the name of the poet. Yet, some deep thought sits there, maybe.
The world we’re visiting now is on its cut and run, globally, innumerable streams of refugees plod on along the roads all over the earth’s face both accelerating and slowing down (by their counter-directed movements in treks dispersed too chaotically for a meaningful account) the spin discovered and declared by Galileo.
Messy madhouse everywhere. Yet, there still are places for sober people to reach out to each other. One of such spots provides proza.ru – long live the site! It’s where I can meet so dear to my heart compatrio… er… sorry, guys, I revved overmuch at this point because at proza.ru I, actually, have none of the kind.
The site whose visitors’ majority do share the mutual historical past. Our dads and grandpas stomped in the same columns to the front lines, and extermination camps, and demonstrations on Mayday and on the Great October Revolution Day. Our genes got accrued with a special chromosome, odd yet useful bugger, for composing false reports and giving bribes to the established cadres.
Deeper than the unenlightened rest of the world comprehend we the famous address of N. Khrushchev to the UN General Assembly—off tore the the berserk hero the shoe from his left foot to hammer repeatedly at the varnished rostrum top in time to maddened chant, ‘I’ll show you the motherfucking Kuzka’s mother!’
That’s when even the most experienced synchronous interpreters scratched their well-trained heads: who’s Kuzka?!
(*Note for the Generation Z: Khrushchev was the head of the Soviet Union. And what a clever head he had! Even at hangover spells. He could announce the precise date of Communism coming in its own right all over the USSR or give out a motivational divination, like, ‘We’ll catch up America and overtake them!’)
And after the indestructible USSR collapsed disintegrating into separate states sprung up from our mutual Motherland fragments, I was left without countrymen and my relief and consolation comes mostly from the same language users who roll out their literary works at proza.ru each one with their own spelling innovations.
To them, my lingua-roomies with acute graphomaniacal addiction, address I my question—
How to write? Tell me!
‘Write’ not in the sense of poking the keyboard with a finger or two but as regards quality – how? So as to reach an effect stronger than the moonshine shooting down to your very heels, the quality awakening self-admiration, ‘Bastard SOB, you’ve done the real thing!’ That’s what I crave for.
Well, okay, you know as well as I do there’s a slew of courses, master-classes, and webinars all anxious to sell you all kinds of know-how that ‘just works’. However, no use in hooking us, the lingua-roomies, with spangle glitter and chaff stuff that makes us retch.
I think, when I think (not constantly yet prolongedly), that a forum-like approach is what we need here combined also with willful sharing of personal experience. All of us have this or that trick begotten in hard labors, some ‘scribbler’s charm’ to run the sought result down and fixate for readers’ gratification. This here prologue is the cornerstone which I put, in full command of my sane and sober (as of yet) frame of mind, into the foundation of the edifice of gratis dispensation assets amassed concerning how to write so as not to feel ashamed in the long run.
You can do writing in different ways – sober, drunken, giving free reign to your loco-motion reflexes, and etc…
(*The user of LMR, the third from the above mentioned methods, should equip themselves with a couple of ball pens and a pack of copy paper (A4, 500 sheets per pack) and start writing without watching what they, actually, write. Neither plot nor story line, nor characters’ names are needed. All the details are decided by the skeletal-muscle parts of the author whose mission during the creative act is to bring themselves to and hold on in the state of ‘automatism’ which, by the way, is the name of this particular method.
In the morning, the loco-writer checks the thing produced while they kept the pen replacing the filled-out sheets, and choo-chooing on, swoony and enthusiastic.
Well, well, well, let’s see what I created this night? Oh-oh! What the… Well, I never… I be damned if it’s not… Yes! It’s the fourth volume of War and Peace written just overnight! O, fuck! The fourth volume for the fourth time in one month!
No wonder, and no use hitting the roof when you let the outflow gush on its own accord, uncontrolled, like, AI throwing together programs for its private entertainment.
Up front, I have to disenchant you, the trick described here is not my choice, I prefer “in absentia” digging. The idea was picked up from a prominent Soviet author from the period of stagnation in the USSR.
So he instructed (I don’t divulge his name for human reasons but those interested indeed might contact me by email), ‘It was Chekhov to tutor me. I opened a book of his stories, and began copying, line after line’.
Even though Chekhov failed to steel him into Chairman of Writers Union of the USSR (not coach’s fault obviously, the trainee should have licked himself into shape under tutelage of Comrade Sholokhov) still and yet the guy got trained enough for the position of Manager of War Prose Department.
Weird as it seems, we still can see a scintilla of sense in his reasoning – when you follow someone’s back very closely, step after step, the trick decreases the wind slaps into your own mug…
And now the last fig leaf falls off my winding perambulations, it only remains to confess who namely was chosen for the paragon of artisan while producing the work that follows after concluding this here prologue which I still cannot shut up with.
The tricky subtlety of the question in no way succumbs to its importance, however, one more detour.
A line-by-line copying author’s text (who’s a worthy candidate? naive gull, you!) is for dummies. I prefer translating. But over again: who from? After Joyce and Pynchon to pick up some 50 Shades of Murky Shit? The like tender-mindedness doesn’t stand to reason…
Well, on the second thought, a possible undertaking, hypothetically, the Shades, yet practically I’ll doze off halfway thru any moony-wooly para…graph… (Yawning.)
Damn, enough! I choose this one. The Algorithm of Chaos published online quite recently and by a trustworthy writer, in my personal estimation.
And here we reach the happy end of the prologue, congratulations to the survivors in the trek. You’ve shown you mettle with flying colors, guys!
2023-05-03
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It’s not an epigraph but the uttermost warning to the over-pedantic eggheads trained to sniff out anachronisms, stylistic lacunae, regressions from the sacrosanct spelling rules and other trifles like the use of anti-normative 4-(xyz)-letter lexicon.
‘And you, Most Esteemed High-Muckety-Muck, would you kindly shut the book so as to once again peruse the title, please? Think it over before coming back if you’re,