Work in progress

It isn't easy for me to write.

I doubt that I'm the only writer to learn that it can be extremely difficult, especially if you're new to it and don't have a routine. Most writers who've talked about the practice are morning writers; get up early, have breakfast, spend a couple of hours writing, break for lunch, and go for a walk in the afternoon. Maybe revise what they've done. And once you've established that pattern, even if you can't come up with anything brilliant, at least you've addressed the hardest part of all; sitting up at the keyboard and putting something down. You can always change it, or add to it, or delete it later.

I can't seem to manage that. For one thing, I teach most mornings. I take a power-nap of twenty minutes to half an hour. And then, more often than not, I goof off. Read my news feed, catch up on back issues of The New Yorker. Or, if I really need an excuse for not doing any writing, I'll mow the lawn.

But sometimes, I'll get an idea and I can't be distracted until it's at least taken shape. I'll work on it for hours at a stretch, then come back to it the next day, and work some more. Of course, sometimes I just get stuck, and don't know where the piece is going, and I set it aside. I fell no guilt over that; were I to go on, it might turn out to be garbage and what began as a good idea has turned out to be filler for the recycling icon on my desktop.

Several months ago, I got an idea for a story. I set it in St. Petersburg, Russia. A wealthy, dressed-to-kill woman pays a call on an old fortune teller (a real stereotype). She's going to murder her husband. But the tables are turned, somehow, I didn't work out the details, and the murderer gets murdered instead and her husband may have been in cahoots with the old babushka. I got as far as describing the streets of St. Petersburg - well, one street, actually, Nevsky Prospekt, and the alleyway where the old woman lives. I realized that the whole idea sounded corny, and I dropped it. Sort of.

A month ago I came back to it. The rich woman and the old woman stayed, and the Nevsky Prospekt setting came back to me. Nevsky Prospekt is like Petersburg's 5th Avenue, and I set the story during the White Nights. That's the Summer Solstice, when the sun dips below the horizon, but it never gets dark. The old woman's apartment was easy to recreate, along with the alleyway she lived on. But other elements began to creep in, too: a mysterious young girl, Olya, who lives with the old woman, Marina Yurievna. Lyudmila's shady past as a member of the Alpha group, part of the KGB. And all this against the background (this part was totally new) of the war in Ukraine.

Now that Putin is able to get soldiers from North Korea, he's less dependent on Russian boys than he was at the start. But for some time, any male over the age of 18 was liable to be snatched off the street and trucked off to the meatgrinder, as they called it. When civilian boys couldn't be found, Viktor Pregozhin, head of the notorious Wagner Group, recruited right out of the Siberian prison gulag. Most of them wound up dead. Many Russian teenagers and twenty-somethings slipped out of the country, no easy feat under the current regime.

These threads began to come together. I couldn't sit down and write the thing in one sitting, but had to work on it over several weeks. And there were a number of false starts, dead ends like the dingy rathole off of Nevsky Prospect that is part of the setting. And I had to really work to keep it from sounding like a lame attempt to imitate John LeCarre, whom I greatly admire.

Anyway, it's done. I've called it "White Nights," and as the name suggests it's about light-and-dark, good-and-evil, and naturally the known versus the unknown. I've sent it off to a number of publications, and I hope that one of them will pick it up. I'm rather pleased with it. My mother-in-law might say, "Khorosho. Molodets."

"Are You Okay?" And Other Stories on Barnes & Noble and Amazon

Home