writers [Theme]

It happens that detective authors, following the example of their characters, do not leave any traces in literature.

At first it seemed like it was even fun to invent characters and their actions, pull strings, move the plot here or there. And then suddenly it turned out that there was no mention of any invention, that the plot was moving not according to her wishes, but according to its own, that actions were not invented, but happened as if by themselves. The famous Pushkin Imagine,

That's how it happened. Happened with every new book. At first, everything falls apart, crumbles like paper that has dried out over time, and the characters all look the same, and events scatter like streams from a broken cup. And then suddenly something clicks in the mechanism of the universe... And the characters take on their own faces. And the plot ceases to be invented, it no longer needs the author’s instructions, it itself knows perfectly well where to go.

A writer without a publisher is empty space. Zero without a stick. But a publisher without an author would never give in to anyone. Symbiosis.

Some of my well-wishers have chosen a rather strange way to console me. More than once I have heard suspiciously unctuous voices: nothing,

Stories and novels are not souvenir T-shirts or wooden football players. These are relics, remnants of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his toolbox to get them out of the ground, damaging them as little as possible. Sometimes the fossil is small, just a shell. Sometimes huge, a Tyrannosaurus rex with all its giant ribs and bared teeth. In any case - a short story or a thousand-page novel - the excavation technique is essentially the same.

The pain I'm destined to endure.

... always, when I see the first novel dedicated to a wife (or husband), I smile and think: Here

I know you asked what it means to be a writer, and I’m writing you some nonsense. But that’s just nonsense, Ma—I’m not embellishing anything. I'm belittling. This is what writing is, after all, about: you stoop so low that the world offers a new merciful perspective, a panorama of little things; the lint suddenly turns into a sheet of fog the size of your eyeball.

How could I explain that you were talking about writing? How to say that we are so close that the shadows of our hands merge on adjacent pages.

Gould said something else that was interesting to me on the day of my first two notes: write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your writing begins for yourself, in other words, but then it goes out into the world. When you understand what a thing is and do it right - at least as best you can - it belongs to everyone who wants to read it. Or criticize. If you are very lucky (this is my idea, but I think John Gould would have subscribed to it), there will be more of the former than the latter.

This condition was first described by Westphal in 1872 as a disease of fear of large open spaces.

But I started to write another thing - and nothing came of it - I furiously tore up five pages. And now it’s okay, it’s rolling - maybe I’ll even take off from the ground on wheels and that two-winged shadow will run across the paper, for the sake of which it’s only worth writing.

The Lord writes every book. By the hands of the author.