The Whale Belly

He pulled into the short line of cars at the Mexican border. He was doing it. No more bullshit. No more navigating the hormonal politics of school, no more parents sighing their vague disappointments, no more Claire Buchanans wanting to just be friends. He was going to have adventure, get his life started. It was all a matter of making a decision and acting it out, accepting the consequences.

He reached the gate and rolled down the window. The guard at the border was young and lanky. Black curls crept under his green cap.

“American?” he asked, grinning.

“Uh, yes.” Paul held out his driver’s license to the man, who looked at it curiously, then took it. The guard flipped the card over, gave it a little bend, then handed it back.

“Gracias. Bienvenidos a Mexico.”

“Okay, gracias, ten un buen dia,” Paul stammered.

“Okay,” said the guard, then stood back and looked past him to the next car.

Paul rolled up his window and drove forward. He was officially in Mexico.

So. The above is a fairly typical example of how a writing session goes. I dredge up some idea, usually something I used to dream about when I was younger, what Damon Knight in his book Creating Short Fiction would call a narcissistic daydream. I know enough about stories nowadays not to plunge into the narcissism and make a perfect hero perfectly overcoming adversity. I know he or she must fail over and over until it becomes nearly unbearable. The problem is I just can’t seem to do it. It’s not so much because I feel protective of the characters, but that I just don’t feel like dealing with the can of worms I’m about to open. Lazy? Avoidant? Yes and yes. But I need to understand why I don’t have more of an adventurer’s attitude for these things, to figure out where my laziness and avoidance comes from and how to readjust.

One thing is for sure, I don’t have any feelings of strong attachment to my characters. In many ways I’m a bit revolted by them. I remember when I was young and prone to painful crushes, I would idealize girls above and beyond the dirty realities of humanity — shitting, farting, body odor, dental cavities, prejudice, pigheadedness, promiscuity, etc. Whenever I their humanness manifested and sullied my perfect image, I chased it away like carrion from a corpse, but of course I could do nothing about the rot. I now understand how misogynistic this pedestalizing was. But my point is that I still seem unable to dive into the sometimes ugly realities of my own characters in order to really understand who they are and love them despite their flaws. For instance, my fledgling Paul crossing the Mexican border is revealing his own naivete and narcissism in a way that makes me want to dismiss him rather than witness his quick unravelling. I lack confidence in him, like some asshole dad who is embarrassed by his son’s lack physical prowess.

Perhaps I lack empathy, which is probably a result of my own feelings of inadequacy and a projection of self-hate. I’m not trying to get maudlin about this, nor do I think I’m utterly alone in thinking about myself in this way. I’m willing to bet that most people struggle with self-loathing from time to time, and it’s not so much a matter of needing reinforcement from others as it is working to change a habit of thinking, which of course can be helped along with the support of friends and family. For me, I tend to be avoidant when confronted with my own frailties, and I even cringe and lose concentration when I see them reflected back to me in books. And so, when I sense them encroaching in my own work, I pull back, I freeze, I quit. I avoid.

Now that I think about it, avoiding these parts of myself was the reason I dropped out of my doctoral studies. I had failed so miserably in teaching that having to study and write through about education was just too much for me to handle.

But now! Now armed with this knowledge about the nature of my avoidance, it’s like I have a trail map to growth, and a number of pinnacles to summit. Maybe in trying to address my own weakness I’ll develop as a writer as well.