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, a deep thought 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 the spin declared by Galileo with their treks directed too chaotically for a meaningful account. Messy madhouse everywhere. Yet, there still are places for sober people to reach out to each other. One of such places is 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 have none of the kind.

All of us there surely 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 the Day of Great October Revolution. Our genes have been added with a special chromosome, odd yet useful, for composing false reports and giving bribes to the established cadres. Deeper than the rest of the world comprehend we the famous address of N. Khrushchev to the UN General Assembly—off tore the the bitchcakes gone hero his shoe from his foot to hammer repeatedly at the varnished rostrum top while chanting madly, ‘I’ll show you the motherfucking Kuzka’s mother!’ That’s when the most experienced synchronous interpreters scratched their well-trained heads: who’s Kuzka?!

(*Note for the Generation M: Khrushchev was the head of the Soviet Union. And what a clever head he had! Even at hangover. 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 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 in regard to quality – how? The quality stronger than moonshine shooting down to your very heels, the quality up to the 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, webinars anxious to sell you all kinds of know-how that ‘just works’. However, no use in hooking us, the lingua-roomies, by spangling wrappers 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 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 it for readers’ gratification. This preface is the cornerstone which I put, while retaining my sane and sober (as of yet) frame of mind, in the edifice of gratis dispensing the 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 practices, etc...

(*The locomotive in the third of above methods 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 and keep 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, and changed the sheets, and choo-choed on, swoony and enthusiastic. Well, well, let’s see what I’ve created this time? Oh-oh! What the… Well, I never… I be damned it it’s not… Yes! It’s the fourth volume of War and Peace written 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 digging up in absentia. The idea was picked up from a prominent Soviet author from the period of stagnation in the USSR.

Thus instructed he (I don’t divulge his name for human reasons but those interested might contact me by email), ‘It was Chekhov to tutor me. I placed abook of stories by him and started copying, line after line’.

Even though Chekhov failed to steel him into Chairman of the 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 reached the position of Manager of War Prose Department.

Weird as it seems, we still can see a speckle of sense in his reasoning – when you follow someone’s back very closely, step after step, the maneuver mitigates wind slaps into your 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 preface which I still cannot shut up with.

The tricky subtlety of the question is no less than its importance, however, one more detour.

A line-by-line copying of an author’s text (who from? you, naive gull!) is for dummies. I prefer translation. But over again: who from? After Joyce and Pynchon to pick up some 50 Shades of Murky shit? Such tender-mindedness doesn’t stand to reason…

Well, on the second thought, a possible undertaking, hypothetically, 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 preface, congratulations to the survivors in the trek. You do have shown you mettle, guys!

2023-05-03