I don't remember where, but I once read a phrase: "If you want to learn to write, learn to read". To realize how true this is, I had to remember my whole life. I was born in a beautiful city on the Volga - Kostroma. I learned to read at the age of five. My first memory of words read independently looked out from under the blanket in my crib, where I, not to distract my mother from the TV, lay with a children's book in my hands. It took half a minute for each word, but I was terribly interested, and these great efforts only stimulated my curiosity - and what will happen next? The next memory has been erased from my memory, but my mother often told me that one day the kindergarten teacher ran out to meet her and excitedly said that I had read the word "Constitution" on the poster hanging on the wall.
Since second grade, I've been reading nonstop. I signed myself up at the library, which was a four-stop trolleybus ride away. I took two or three books at a time. In my hobby very quickly I plunged into the world of fiction and adventure. At the age of ten, my father instilled in me a passion for astronomy, and I began to devour star encyclopedias. My mother scolded, taking away my books and forcibly kicking me outdoors to get some fresh air. About the depth of my knowledge of astronomy and I myself did not suspect, and discovered them only in the tenth grade, when this subject entered the school curriculum. Our physicist did not get angry at all, catching my stunned look when he made a mistake with the number of satellites of Jupiter when explaining the material. My mother was summoned to the school, I was reported to our physicist's acquaintance, a researcher of some physical department, and at the end of the school year I was sent to the "Meeting of young researchers, innovators and members of scientific societies" in Chelyabinsk with a report on black holes, from where I brought three awards.
The strangest thing was that I couldn't write essays on literature at all. In middle school I got only C's, and the first A's started to appear only in Shakespeare, who was studied in the tenth grade. But I never stopped reading all my life: before work, at meals, on the airplane, in bed and in the bath - I can't remember myself without a book in my hand. Adventures and fiction were still the most exciting to me, but it never occurred to me to write my own works.
A few years after graduating from the University of Technology, I had the opportunity to work for a pharmaceutical company that often organized presentations of new products. Without thinking long, they put a piece of paper with a text in my hands and asked me to give a presentation. "Just learn these words," they said. When I read the text at home, I was horrified: and this is what I have to say in front of a hundred people? It seemed to me that the text was written by a fifth grader. I rewrote the presentation material, bringing the text to a godly form, and it became my first literary work. After the presentation, I was told, "Honey, you have a very good speech!"
However, in the following years of my life I never once thought about starting to write novels. It was only when the Internet penetrated every home, every cell of the body of an ordinary person, touched every project that looked like a business, that I started writing articles for websites. It was the second time when the sea of books I had read came in handy: the articles turned out well, and the customers were satisfied. I refused from constant cooperation with a limited number of customers - freedom of choice of topic was important to me, not compulsory writing of tens of thousands of characters a day. Unexpectedly, tourism became my favorite topic. After several years of almost fruitful work, I received an unexpected offer to participate in writing co-authored novels.
By that time I was already living in Italy, where my romantic nature had taken me. I started working in the travel industry, helping Russian tourists find accommodation in Rome. I even had my own website, where I posted articles both about my own travels and about the sights, customs, and culture of different countries. I thought, "Writing novels? I've never written a novel before!". And, as always in such cases: "Why not give it a try?".
Co-authorship was not very satisfying for me or my co-authors, for the same reason that I had not been successful with commissioned articles - after all, my freedom of speech was limited. Circumstances themselves finally put into my head the idea of writing my first work. But if the novel co-authored by myself offered my imagination already chosen by someone else's theme, then what to write about independently became a stumbling block for me. My late grandmother helped me to overcome it.
While she was alive, my grandmother told me many stories about her youth. And during her youth, many stories from her life were told to her by her grandmother, a gypsy on her mother's side. This was our main family legend, which I decided to tell on the pages of my first novel "
The Gypsy Woman's Tale". About three quarters of the novel - it is true, I had to make up only what my grandmother either did not know or did not remember, and to embellish the events was necessary to interest the reader. And even the gift of foresight in the female half of our family, which appeared by itself when it was necessary, and then disappeared - not fiction.
My second novel "
With angels beside" became a cry of indignation of a man who was torn by fate from one society with its usual quiet way of life and thrown into another - alien, free, unruly. Of course, next to angels there are demons in every society, though not everywhere they are so openly wielded. I wanted to weave into the history of the country that became my second homeland, Italy, a story about the lives of ordinary people and the intrigues of those who control this life. I did not even change the names of commoners, politicians, popes or presidents.
I have often been asked the question: if I had a time machine, where would I want to go - to the past or to the future? Strangely enough, the future has never appealed to me. I've always been interested in the past and as far away as possible. If I had been given a time machine, I would have traveled to the time of Jesus Christ, visiting both Judea and ancient Rome. This desire was the reason for writing a third book, "
Hebrew legends about the kings of Israel and Judea." The result amazed me myself: since it took a tremendous amount of information, I learned many facts that I did not suspect. Especially dramatic was the ending - the almost complete destruction of a huge civilization, the remains of which were scattered all over the world.
I'm afraid to ask myself if I'll keep writing, though I'm slowly working on my fourth book, a collection of fantasy short stories called
Take it on the Road. I will definitely finish it, because I like doing work that I get to do well. And the fact that I've been reading all my life certainly helps me with that. I now know for sure that you can only learn to write by learning to read. It is important for our generation now to preserve the culture of reading books - not looking at pictures on the Internet or watching videos, but reading the good old friends of our childhood: paper books that you can hold in your hand, touch the cover, turn the pages. Let us read and write - only in this way can we not let this beautiful culture perish!