"Write a story that no one else will come up with but you." Denis Bannikov — writer, teacher at the Media Institute

Denis Bannikov is a screenwriter and novelist, a graduate and teacher at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, a master of courses at the Creative writing school.

From personal archive of Denis Bannikov

He has been published in “Yunost” (stories "Tea without Tea" and "Tomorrow in Alexandria"), “Novy Mir” (story "Someone's Daughter"), “Druzhba Narodov” (story "The Thing") and other literary magazines, and in 2019 he was a member of the grand jury of the “National Bestseller” award. Denis graduated with a bachelor's degree in law. Upon entering, he knew from the beginning that he would never work as a lawyer. Denis has always loved writing, but in 11th grade he realised that he was not ready to pass the USE in literature to enter the journalism faculty. He focused on the subjects he understood, and returned to writing much later — in Vyshka's Master's program “Creative Writing”, where he now teaches. 

— Why did you go to the master's program “Creative Writing” instead of journalism, as you wanted to do before? 

— I considered the scriptwriting department of VGIK for my master's degree because I come from a movie theatre family, my parents, grandparents and grandmothers are directors, actors and actresses. At one time they told me: if I went to the acting faculty, I would be rejected. But no one said anything about scriptwriting! Then the master's program "Creative Writing" opened at the Higher School of Economics. I saw that there was everything there: screenwriting, prose, drama, comics, and games. I really love HSE as a whole, and I wanted to stay in that ecosystem.

Not having any portfolio at that time, I started urgently running for internships. I got my first small job as a literary editor at the “Kultura” channel. In parallel, working on my diploma on the topic "Medical Risk: Criminal and Legal Characterization", I read all the world classics from the XIX century to the present day. I entered the Master's program and was qualified for free tuition and for two years I was absolutely and irrevocably happy. The master's program is still organised in such a way that we integrate students into the book environment very quickly. If they have good texts, they will be published in journals.

— What is taught in the Master's program "Creative Writing"?

— The learning process depends entirely on what kind of goal-setting and what kind of background the student comes with, because the Master's program does not imply any restrictions on age or specialisation. Sometimes established writers with published books come to study, for whom the master's program will not give them anything fundamentally new in terms of connections. They come precisely to learn and try something new. The whole writing track of the training, and there are also translators and critics on the program, breaks down into three big components. The core of the whole training is the creative workshops. Once a week you meet with the whole group, and this creative workshop teaches, roughly speaking, the basics of dramaturgy and storytelling, creative writing, how to write prose, how to invent and write a character, how to build a plot, how to find your voice, develop a style, how to create an effect, how to write in different genres.

— How do the creative writing workshops work?

— At each workshop, we write so-called five-minute etudes, when we literally set a timer and give some small task, very applied, to practise some skill — for example, "a monologue of a used condom". Then we read the whole thing out loud. This is also a very important part — don't be afraid to read your text aloud, even if it is written under stressful conditions. Then the students share their feedback, but above all, the teachers share it, and from each creative writing workshop, armed with this knowledge, the students go off to write their homework, for which they are given a week. We read these homework assignments, leave written reviews, and sort out mistakes. Creative seminars are a springboard for writing a term paper and then a thesis. In the first year it is a short story, in the second year the thesis is a collection of short stories, a novella or a novel.

— You mentioned creative writing. What is it and how do you understand whether a piece of writing is creative or not?

— There is no Russian version of creative writing, except for a literal translation. Literary mastery is the closest translation to the truth. In the Western context, half of Booker and Nobel laureates and famous writers are graduates of master's programs in creative writing. It's a years-honed set of techniques and skills that can be mastered to tell better stories. Creative writing by no means makes new Gogols and Pushkins out of anyone, nor does it add talent. Creative writing teaches you how to use this talent. We study texts from different times, contexts, and cultures. We look at how different authors handle these rules and contexts very differently. Ultimately, you first imitate and then try to find your own. That's what creative writing fosters. 

— Is it possible to make a living solely from writing these days? 

— The short answer is no, you can't. The long answer is that probably less than 1% of all writers can afford to make such money as writing, and we all know these names well: the Pelevins, the Sorokins, the Dontsovs. Most of the money comes not from royalties and fees, but from the sale of rights to screen adaptation, to book translation. There's a lot of money in literary prizes. When my favourite Alexei Salnikov received the "National Bestseller" award for "Petrovs in Flu", he said very charmingly and honestly: "I'm probably the first writer to stand here on stage and be happy to finally close my mortgage." In 99% of cases, writers have to (or want to) have some other full-time job, employment of some sort. The good news is that it's a blessing for a writer to have some kind of profession. A profession is the production of a specific product that can be evaluated qualitatively, objectively in some ready-made matrix. By what metrics we can assess the quality and literary value of artistic texts is not very clear. In order to write interesting books, it is very useful for a writer to have a profession that gives a second, third hypostasis to his experience and life.

— Speaking of professions: how and in what ways do media people differ from literary people?

— First of all, they differ in that media people need storytelling, but few of them write fiction. They want to write movie scripts, commercials, podcasts. Besides, both I and the students themselves say every year that they learn a little bit of everything: journalism, storytelling, editing, sound, video, tech — and they need to choose a specialisation. I see many Media Institute students as somewhat lost. So writers, as opposed to media people, seem very focused to me. If you look at it from the outside, it seems to me that media people think much more about form than about content. A media guy has everything in his head: how he's going to pitch it, how he's going to promote it, how he's going to maximise his reach, what kind of marketing is behind it, what kind of funds are needed for it, and so on. The writer dreams of never having to think about it at all in his life.

— Artificial intelligence is being actively developed now. Do you admit that the same ChatGPT can be applied to work with fiction texts?

 — Of course, it is already being used. I recently held a round table with four writers in “Nekrasovka”. One of them was the artist Pavel Pepperstein. He wrote a book with the help of artificial intelligence. A big interview with him and his AI doubles, it's already such a meta-level. There are two fundamentally different approaches. One: an artificial intelligence generates text on demand. Hand on heart, it can only give you an interesting idea, but you will still write the text yourself. It can also help you figure out stylistics or stylization. You can throw in your idea and ask the artificial intelligence to stylize the story as a Victorian novel or a particular author. That way you can see where you need to tag. The second option is like Pepperstein did: you use the artificial intelligence toolkit itself as part of some artistic concept. You engage in a dialog with this system, and it becomes the essence of your text.

— What if we assume that artificial intelligence learns to generate its own ideas?

— If artificial intelligence begins to possess self-generated ideas, then we will enter a fundamentally new stage in the writing sphere. I quite admit that, like Ilf and Petrov, some writer Ivan Ivanovich will be able to write a book in collaboration with an artificial intelligence. That's what Pepperstein tried to do, but for now it's an experiment, but someday, maybe it will become the norm. Remember, Pelevin had a literary-police algorithm, Porfiry Petrovich, who investigates cases and writes edgy novels about it. I quite admit that, as with many of Pelevin's novels, we may find ourselves in a future where artificial intelligence can write its own books based on its own experiences.

— Do you think it's possible to write something unique these days, and if not, why bother with literature at all?

— Depends on the definition of the word "unique". If you mean "to write something where there will be no points of intersection with anything that has gone before" — probably not. Or we don't know of such a form yet — but that's like inventing a new colour. Art in general is intertextual — it's not for nothing that Julia Kristeva introduced the term. I wouldn't define uniqueness in art as some kind of story that didn't exist at all before. We use tropes, optics, tools that have been developed before us. The story is going into the twenty-first, twenty-second century. There are new events, new experiences. "New" — in completely different spheres and contexts. Why not use the tools we have already developed to talk about new topics? Or take eternal themes and develop a new toolkit for them, as the members of “Real Art Association” did with poetry in their time. It seems to me that one can write something unique by focusing either on uniqueness in form or uniqueness in content. It cannot be a fundamentally new form, a fundamentally new thought, and new emotions. At the end of the day, a person's emotions will still be the ones they've experienced once before. 

As Quentin Tarantino used to say, come up with a story that we haven't seen yet because you haven't made it, and make that movie. That is: write the kind of story that no one will come up with unless you come up with it.

Author: Anzhelika Protasova, a first-year student of Bachelor’s programme “Journalism”

Translation: Drankeevich Yanina, a second-year student of Master's programme "Contemporary Journalism"