A fragmented picture of Moscow

I would like to paint a picture of Moscow with its scattering of golden onion domed churches amid grey blocky monoliths. Grandmothers begging in slippers and pop-socks, smelling of urine, outside of cocktail bars where girls dance in thongs. £5 peaches and fast food servers with five gold upper teeth. Since I arrived I've walked and walked and smiled and smiled. Moscow is not a city of smilers. Honestly, I suspect that the rest of Russia may not be either. It does mean that when you receive a smile - my favourite being returned from an incredulous uniformed woman in her 60's whose job it is to monitor the security screens at my nearest Metro - it is (quite literally in the case of jacket potato server) golden. I would like to paint a picture but so far, during my 3 days here, I'm only just managing to gather pieces, I'm waiting to form them into a picture I can comprehend because I have never felt more like a stranger in a strange place.

One feels instantly outside in Russia. I felt less so in Vietnam perhaps because there was defined role for me - I was a da trang: white foreigner. Here I look so much like everyone else that I am asked directions by Russians visiting Moscow then met with either guffaws or baffled stares when I shake my head, bring an apologetic hand to my chest and say 'Engliski.' As I expected Russia is a puzzle to me and not an easy one to begin unpuzzling. I had forgotten the dislocation of being removed from the language but also how pleasing the isolation is that goes with that. How undemanding, liberating, it is to be alone in a country where no one requires anything of you and where, even if they did, you could not communicate anyway.

And the writing? The reason I am here sleeping in a dorm room with seven strangers, eating only pastry and potatoes for two days and walking the streets with my head exploding as I try to absorb everything from the shape of the paving stones to the print of a woman's blouse? Well, the first draft prognosis is….good. At least good for a shitty first draft that is. Obviously I would rather tar and feather myself than have it read by another living soul but me, myself reading it is bareable, the raw material is there.

  How do I know this? Because the story has shape, the characters have at least two dimensions and are sympathetic (even the ones that should be anything but) there are clear motivations and conflicts and with each page I care about what will happen. I wanted good, or at the very least, less painful things for my protagonists Dave and Alena. I have become a fairly robust self-critic so I can see all the (many, many) things that need to happen before another anyone can lay their eyes on it but I can also see the story is there, the foundations to build upon. 

  So now I need to establish a routine. I wrote my first novel Tony Hogan on a five month sabbatical in Vietnam, China, Cambodia. I lived in both Hanoi and Saigon for over a month, otherwise I was moving every few days, every few weeks. Each place required a different sort of routine. Part of the challenge of writing is adapting to changes in time, location, environment - staying productive and focussed and being able to sit down wherever and whenever, find whatever it is you need to write within and not let that be dictated by outside factors.  

The Moscow routine is thus: I wake and breakfast (I'm eating solely from local farmers markets as the prices, even for a London girl are hair-raising, £4 a coffee, £5 a peach). I go to a cafe around the corner which serves good cheap coffee (I suspect because it is attached to a lap dancing bar) and start gently, very gently, redrafting the already written first draft of Thirst - transporting myself back to the summer streets of Hackney. After lunch, I take myself on a long walk, getting the metro to a random station and then walking, walking, walking - writing and taking pictures to use as prompts as I go. In the evening I write up scenes that might or might not end up in the novel weaving through what I have seen, heard, felt. Right now I am writing Dave's journey, trying to conjure his feelings, responses. I write longhand and hope that the fragments will glue somehow. I trust myself to write now and make it better later. That's the thing about redrafting, it's essential to trust you can make those fragments what you want them to be, that they will translate to the story you want to tell. It is an act of closing your eyes and jumping.

So now more gathering of those tiny, tiny details. Looking at everything, smiling at everyone, trusting that this un-scientific process will yield and adapting everything else to the case in hand: redrafting, gathering, writing. 
Next: Train journeys