"On Writing"

A terrible tribute to my first ever writing inspiration.

This morning’s shower thought was that I should catch up on all the weeks of the year so far that I’ve missed and failed to produce even one post.

I will not be sending them out as emails as to avoid spamming you pretty people, but they will be coming to your substack feed so you can just look out for them here. You can also add my substack to your RSS feed or check here if you miss me or you want to see if I’m being true to my word. I will send out this one and the one that will happen at some point next week. Hopefully. Pray nobody gets sick (fuck, shouldn’t have said that).

To make this a little easier and remove barriers for productivity we will switch into emergency mode, code named Perfect Is The Enemy Of The Good. (wait so you've been trying to be perfect this whole time? Oh… - no I haven't, but you’re about to find out how much worse it can get.) Julz also came up with a new name for this blog. Up til now I’ve been rolling with the draft name I never intended to keep. I say he came up with it, but it’s something I say to him about a thousand times a day, and yesterday around the 734th time he said Hey, that's what your blog should be called! So welcome to

Lissen!

(Quality not guaranteed.)

I’m so committed to this undertaking that I’m typing this on my phone, something I never even dreamed of until I started to half an hour ago.

So listen here punks. I’m going to tell you about Slava Se [Слава Сэ]. ¹

***

Stephen King said, “write every day”, so maybe I should try. If it’s good enough for Stephen King, it’s good enough for me. Of course as you already know, I also had the same thought this morning in the shower, so… Stephen who? He also said, “I’m the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries,” which: one, great product placement; and two, a Big Mac never made me cry like he did, so… what else is he wrong about?

In any case, maybe if I’m to write every day for two weeks, today is the day I write about Slava Se, my first ever writing inspiration.

Slava was a friend of my mom’s. He was a soft spoken and somewhat shy person. He didn’t endlessly crack jokes or demand to be the centre of attention. He listened well and considered his words carefully before speaking. He loved guitar and author songs. As far as I remember had talent and skill that would encourage people to pause what they were doing and listen.² They were part of the same social circle in Riga with my mom. They all got together, played their guitars, sang songs, drank, talked, all that good stuff. I’m assuming they got together to play guitars, sing songs, drink, talk, and all that good stuff. They equally could have been summoning demons and performing blood rituals, though it would have definitely been out of character. Not for my mom, but definitely for some of her friends (jk sorry mom and co).

Whatever is the opposite of name dropping, that’s what my mom does. She would have called him a good friend up to around 2008, when his LiveJournal (if that's not a throwback!) became really popular. Then he became a very loved from afar casual acquaintance.

Around 2006, 2007, he started a LiveJournal blog. It was a good time for personal blogging, before homeware hauls, sponsors, and polished photography. It was just the reader and the guy telling the story. My mom showed me his blog and it really landed with me. Slava was a plumber, he had a wife and two daughters. That’s what he wrote about. He would take simple everyday situations and turned them into something else; he had a way of writing down real life like it was filled with charm and subtext. It didn’t need parental guidance. It was smart, really witty, and showed a command of language that I haven’t seen in any other modern Russian writing. He didn’t make fun of anything at its expense. Really kind and joyful satire; I thought it was magic.

He did a reading from his new book here in London in January or February 2020. I was pregnant with Zoe, and my mum invited Julz and me to come with her. It was the last time we saw him, because in 2021 he died of Covid. That was a really hard pill to swallow. I’ve been re-reading his books (of which there are 9!) and old entries from those early years. They take me right back to our big box monitor family PC, where my mom and I are crowding in on each other reading a new Slava Se post.

What my mom loves bringing up is his commitment to the craft, his meticulous process. The way he deleted most of what he wrote, keeping only the absolute best. He knew linguistics, philology, had an immense vocabulary, was incredibly well read; yet his writing was always so seemingly simple. Only simple if you’re there to enjoy it, of course; you realise the complexity of it the moment you try to write a dupe. I’d know: sometimes I still feel like I’m just trying to be him. Not on purpose: we just happen to share a sense of humour.

He wrote every day, too. A true iceberg.

I considered translating something, but I fear the beauty of his writing would be lost and I just can’t bring myself to do it. So for today I’ll just translate some quotes from posts and interviews. Let me know if you’d like me to do more; or if you’d like to read a clumsily translated post.

“I don’t try to write funny. Because when you write with the initial thought of making someone laugh, you can never do it. I just write emotionally, and succinctly, and I guess from time to time a metaphor makes the reader giggle.”

“There’s no fiction, I don’t even need to be creative. Life is so full of stories that I don’t need to compose anything; I can barely keep up with writing them down.”

“[Since quitting plumbing and beginning to write full time, talking about freedom and flexibility] It’s almost the same. The difference is, a plumber is still being held accountable by someone, while a writer has to hold himself accountable. You have to get yourself out of bed and sit yourself behind a desk, when the fridge is right there 5 metres away. A fridge is much more pleasant than a desk in its function, but I have to sit down and work.”

The interviewer asked him if his writing is funny because that’s his attitude and how he views life: as something funny and easy; or is it because the humour is helping him deal with the complexities of it.

“I would say the latter. I started writing because I wanted to create a world for myself where I would feel comfortable, where everything would be going well. If something bad, or difficult happened, the finale would always be beautiful anyway. I want my books to be the same for the reader now. So you can open the book and be shielded from the outside world, and until you shut it again nothing bad can happen.”

“Our children draw their mother from memory. According to their drawings they were birthed by a diver who is wandering potato fields wearing a mini-skirt.”

“Raising two girls is easy.

I know how to bark: “Hey, go eat!” and “Hey, go sleep!” I’m very good at it. Lyal sleeps after the thirteenth bark. Not sure about Masha, after the hundredth I fall asleep myself.

I can cook sausages, know where the tights are (just don’t know - which ones are whose).

It’s just the hair… in the morning you’re supposed to use them and hair ties to form creations “like a princess”. I can only do “like a Martian woman”. “

***

Here’s the great tragedy of our cultural divide: you’ll just have to trust me that he was good. I told you this won’t end well. But at least it happened today.

Sleep well, substack.

1. Only has a Russian wikipedia page, but thought I’d include it. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Слава_Сэ

2. Check out the linked Wikipedia article about Russian bard songs.