Ksenia Anske's Blog, page 26

What’s it like to live under fascist dictatorship

Illustration by Anette Moi

I am writing this post at the request of my writing mentor who said "We all want to know!" Irkadura was supposed to be the book that drew from the wealth of information I'm sitting on, having grown up in Soviet Union, lived in GDR in my teenage years, witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and having returned to Moscow where shortly after snipers were shooting people from the roofs, and the country as I knew it ceased to exist. This was the book he asked me to wr...

Draft 5 of TUBE is completed

Image source

Let me start by saying this:Make art. Make art. Make art. And in the words of Neil Gaiman, "Make good art." Art saves lives. Art gives us reason to continue breathing. Art heals. Art inspires. Art helps us process anything. Anything. Anything at all. Art gives us a way to pull through the worst. And when the worst is over, art helps us celebrate and enjoy the best. Now as never before art is what will carry us through.

Writing TUBE forced me into one of the worst of my fears: f...

How do you continue writing?

Illustration by Eline Van Dam

We need your voice now more than ever. Your ideas. Your thoughts. We need work to do, to have our voices heard. But how to do it when you feel helpless? Or so enraged you’re boiling? Or horrified to the state of blankness? I feel the same right now, and yet I know I must write. Here is how I do it.

There are three crucial things that allow me to concentrate and crank out words daily:

1. TIME.

Unless there is a chunk of at least uninterrupted 4 hours, it’s highly...

The new America on the bones of women

Illustration by Sungwon

Today I feel like all the women of the world are dead under my feet, and those who aren't dead yet are doomed, and there is no way out no matter where I turn, with the reign of white supremacist patriarchy in America and the white nationalist patriarchy in Russia, with Putin reaching out his friendly hand to Trump, to shake it over the ocean and over the bones of those who don't fit in the white, straight, Christian, sexist, privileged world: women, people of color,...

I have retreated into myself to search within

Image source

There are no paths where I'm going, only chaos. There is no sound, only garbled noise. There is no up or down, no left or right. I have to create it out of nothing and make sense of what was never meant to make sense, and yet if I don't, it will continue to hound me, to stalk me; it will continue to feed on me from the inside, until it will make me hollow and brittle, and I will collapse like a skin-sack without bones to hold it up because they rotted away, the flesh long eate...

The need for silence

Illustration by Liisa Kruusmagi

These last scenes of TUBE are taking a lot out of me. By the time I'm done writing for the day, I'm empty and need silence. To reconcile with my little self that is telling me my story, and to think about how to dramatize it and make it not mine but Olesya's, and to feel for her, feel so much, there isn't space for anything else. So I need silence. Stillness. Sky and trees and wind, just space to be. Without taking, without rushing somewhere, running, hurryi...

The miracle one hour of storytelling can do

Illustration by Júlia Sardà

We have Russian cleaners who come clean our house. Today a new woman came to clean, and I chatted briefly with her and hung out in the kitchen while she cleaned my writing cave. Then I came up and we got to talking.

Every time someone new comes, I always ask them what they really do. Or did. Many Russian women immigrants have degrees up the wazoo, and after coming to America work as cleaners to make ends meet while they study English and try to figure out how to...

What I ate growing up

Image source

The typical Soviet snack was "бутерброд" (from German "butterbrot," literally bread with butter), and it was a slice of white or black bread, smeared with butter, and with a slab of bologna on top, or maybe cured meat, if you could afford it, and a slice of cheese, if you wanted to be fancy. Plus some people would top it with a slice of tomato or cucumber. But mostly it was bread and butter and some meat stuff. Or, it could be sprats in oil, just slapped on top. (Or caviar, if...

The divine force for writers

Illustration by Todd Slater

There must be some kind of a divine force out there for writers. I have gotten to the point in my draft where the timing was wrong, and I didn’t know how to fix it. The train route my characters take requires an additional 12 hours of travel, and according to my scenes it’s too much, I must end the ride in order to continue the story according to the plot. And what do you know. I go research the route, and turns out I got it wrong! It’s too long. It’s the old ro...

Applying the rule of the core word is making my writing stronger

Still from movie Печки-Лавочки

Applying the rule of the core word is really helping me make my writing stronger. The idea is that every sentence has one core word that turns it. In other words, every sentence is about something, and that something is signified with one word. The strongest sentence is the one where the core word is at the very end. This is the sentence that keeps us reading, holding us in suspense, until we find out what the sentence is really about. It can also be in the m...