The Ones Putin Scares and the Ones He Kills: Two Short Novels by Volodymyr Dibrova

Another Volodymyr the world should be admiring now. (Photo credit: The Ukrainian Weekly; https://subscription.ukrweekly.com/2021/12/interview-with-volodymyr-dibrova-about-his-new-book-on-new-perspectives-on-taras-shevchenko/)

I doubt that Volodymyr Dibrova thought he was being prophetic when he wrote the two short novels Peltse and Pentameron nearly 40 years ago.

But he was—let’s call him an accidental prophet—and I couldn’t help thinking of those stories again as I’ve watched bombs falling on innocent civilians and that bullshit Russian security council meeting in February when the Butcher of the Kremlin sought feedback from his advisors (not that it really mattered) about recognizing two proxy states in eastern Ukraine and conducting a “special military operation” to save them from the Nazis.

Peltse and Pentameron are sides of the same coin. One shows us the apparatchik mindset that turns government higher-ups into paranoid sheep; the other shows ordinary people trying to get on with their lives despite the stupid decisions made by those sheep.

Comrade Peltse is clearly related to all those ministers sweating it out during the Butcher’s meeting.

Remeber the stammering spymaster Sergei Naryshkin at that meeting? Do you remember how the Butcher bullied him to stick to the script?

Theater of the absurd: The Butcher and his Russian security council meeting held just prior to the invasion of Ukraine.

Peltse has got to be his distant cousin. Peltse is a Class-A fool who has accomplished little of substance and is dogged by a terrifying dream of “an immense monument to himself … falling off the highest mountain and smashing into tiny particles.” Spoiler alert: That dreams turns into reality for him—and let’s hope it happens to Comrade Putin. Soon.

Pentameron’s five characters (hence the title) all work in the same office and yearn and worry about different things—love, safety, fulfillment, art—and it makes for particularly painful reading now. Their real-life counterparts in the cities and towns across Ukraine don’t have time to yearn or dream. Not when bombs are raining down on their heads.

Dibrova is a brilliant stylist who has been part of Harvard University for many years and hails from Donetsk, a city which everyone and their mother unfortunately recognizes now. I first encountered his Peltse and Pentameron in the 1990s and wrote about them in the pages of the Los Angeles Times. It’s not an exaggeration to call them both tightly organized masterpieces. This blog and website are all about the nuts and bolts of writing, and any practicing writer will learn loads of good practical shit from this man. Dibrova’s definitely not the Prince of fiction; you won’t find anything purple in his prose (sorry, I can’t resist a Dad joke now and then).

One of the best lines in my Dibrova collection in fact, in my humble opinion, comes from the introduction by one of the sagest critics and writers I know, Askold Melnyczuk. Of the craftsmanship and economy Dibrova deploys in both, he says: “A novel does not live by pages alone; it is defined by the distance a writer can travel across a sentence.” 

Friggen great. Truer words never spoken. There’s a big lesson in expressive economy in these two novels. Any writer would benefit from studying them..

And, it ties my stomach in knots to say it, since February 24, there is a very tragic timeliness here, too.

More to come, my friends.

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#freeukraine

Introducing My 'Ukrainian Shorts'

My friends, in the days and weeks and months ahead, I’m going to talk — very briefly — about some of the Ukrainian books (poetry, novels, nonfiction) on my bookshelf and why I care about them, and why you should, too.

It’s not going to be up-to-date --- if you want a roundup of the latest works of Ukrainian literature you should read, that’s the kind of thing you’ll probably find in the New York Times or Post book coverage or somewhere else, not here. If I was still at the LA Times, I’d probably have to do something like that. (Actually, a good place to start is with Yuliya Komska’s short memoirish piece “A Stained Glass in Lviv” and Alisa Lozhkina’s look at Ukrainian artists “A Suitcase, a Candle, and a Hammer: Ukrainian Artists Face the Russian Invasion” in the Los Angeles Review of Books, my regular hangout since leaving the Times 10 years ago.

So, instead, for now, I’m just going to share with you the books that I have on the shelf that, over a long time, have become like dear friends to me.

I’ve got no illusions about what I’m doing here. The world is full of morons.

There are many people—scholars, writers—who are the real experts in this area. I’m definitely not. I’m just some poor schmuck whose dad was from Western Ukraine and who cares about his heritage and who’s watching the horrors of Putin’s war on the internet and who’s feeling helpless.

If there are people out there (and of course there are) who don’t want the West to support Ukraine, who are too scared or xenophobic or upset about gas prices to think that this little country matters to the U.S., maybe what I say will make them reconsider (just for a second) even if it doesn’t change their minds.

I have no illusions or expectations here. You probably shouldn’t, either. We’ve both looked at comments threads on YouTube and elsewhere before, right?

The internet is loaded with as many morons as there are stars in the sky.

#freeUkraine

Remember All That Grammar Stuff You Learned in School? It's Time to Forget It!

Aside from the nice promotional graphic that Harvard Science Talks used to promote my recent talk with bestselling science writer Leonard Mlodinow — which I really appreciate because it’s using a ten-year-old photo of me when I had a little more hair — I enjoyed talking with him about a topic near and dear to my heart: how we write.

Len — whom I’ve known since my L.A. Times days — talked about his new book, Emotional, but I also asked him about the writing process that he uses for all of his work, whether it’s a newspaper piece, an academic article, or one of his books. (Check out more information about Len’s new book here.)

What did he say that I liked so much that I’m writing about it here?

Len doesn’t believe in some of those old grammar and composition lessons that most of us learned in school. That makes me really happy —- the older I get, and the more I work on various projects, the less I care about the old rules anymore.

The one rule that annoys me (and Len) the most is the practice of using an outline.

Remember that one? Remember how your teacher made you fill out a long outline with Roman numerals, subheadings, supporting details etc before writing your classroom essay?

I totally understand why they taught us that way: They wanted to make sure we had a genuine compositional shape in our minds before we ever (in those days) put pen to paper. No teacher wants to grade a paper written by a 12- or 13-year-old in stream of consciousness.

But there’s a time—to get all evangelical for a minute—when, like St. Paul said, we need to put childish things away. Any seasoned writer will still plan out an essay or a book (of course), but the sequence and organization part should be more second nature and less like the training wheels on a bicycle. When I work with clients, that’s something I try to get at in order to help them: Sometimes writers are so worried about following an outline that it blocks them. They don’t realize that they have much more freedom to take their manuscript in whatever direction is calling to them.

I could go on, but I won’t—or maybe I will in a future blog item. For now, you’re welcome to enjoy watching/listening to my interview with Len Mlodinow here and hopefully it will prove useful on your own writer’s journey.

J.K. Toole and first impressions

I don't know if you're familiar or not with John Kennedy Toole, author of A Confederacy of Dunces, but there's a lesson in his situation for all of us.

He never published his wondrous comic novel during his lifetime; his mother did it for him. She knew it was good, but she needed a third party to validate the novel's greatness.

So she learned that novelist Walker Percy was living and teaching nearby, and begged him to take a look at her boy's manuscript.

The lesson that I'm thinking every writer should remember is in Percy's introduction to the novel, in which he describes what happened when Toole's mother gave him the manuscript. Their meeting took place in the 1970s long before the advent of email or GoogleDocs, and Toole's manuscript was gross. Dirty, smeared with God knows what. Not a very good first impression.

Percy dreaded reading it. He was looking for a way out, and here's what he hoped would happen:

There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained--that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.

Percy's attitude is not uncommon.

When you pitch your book to agents or directly to publishers, they are going to give you a few pages--or just the first paragraph--to show them what kind of writer you are.

Yes, you might have some incredible things to say later on in your narrative, but it doesn't matter. If you don't hit the right notes early on ... if you don't show them that you understand the essential rules of telling a story ... well … they are going to take a pass on that wonderful story that you have been struggling with for years. I have been there. Trust me.

So go back to your opening pages and ask yourself some hard questions: What will a stranger see when they look at this? Even if it's a work of fiction, is my message still clear enough?

If you’re not quite sure how to answer these questions, we should talk.

Smoke a cigar. Free your mind to write.

When you have something to write, how do you start?

I didn’t plan it this way, but a large part of my interview with Leonard Mlodinow, bestselling author of Elastic, in the Los Angeles Review of Books doesn't talk about his book.

Instead it is about his writing process.

One of the biggest challenges, and one of the reasons why so many people think writing is a painful chore, has to do with the way they’ve been taught to write.

Rather than focus on the creative side of the work, they've been taught to approach it practically — generate the outline, create a list of arguments and sources — even if they don’t have a clue about this stuff when they first sit down to write.

The reason why I love the writing process — always have, always will — is because of the element of discovery. When you don’t limit yourself to a blueprint, you find yourself moving into unexpected places … exciting places. That excitement creates energy, and energy takes you to even more places.

Back to my interview with Len. 

He absolutely hates deadlines because they smother his creative processes. When his friend and colleague Stephen Hawking, arguably the greatest physicists of the 20th century, died in March, Len was given a hard deadline by the New York Times to write about his friend.

Rather than sit down and make a list of what a tribute piece should contain--Hawking’s greatest accomplishments, for instance, or his medical challenges, Len’s personal interactions with him--he avoided all of that. He did something else instead.

He just sat down and wrote. He had no plan in mind. He just wrote and wrote.

“I sat there, still feeling emotional, still feeling pretty raw, and I just opened up my mind and wrote whatever came to me,” he told me in our interview, “I didn’t think or judge or analyze. I just wrote.”

After he had filled several pages, then his analytical side kicked in. It was much easier to shape and organize an article out of this raw material rather than start off with a blank page or a structured outline (which is what our teachers taught us).

Even then, it can still be difficult to get started. If that is true for you, let me know. I can help.