The Whale Belly

For about a week or so I’ve been posting whatever comes up during my thirty minute writing window. A theme has emerged already, my struggle with writing, or becoming a writer. I thought that maybe this is what the site is all about after all. Me trying to figure out how to develop into the best writer I can be. And maybe by chronicling this journey it might help others, assuming I ever reach such a level to offer wisdom. For now, writing here seems to be an indispensable learning tool.

I want to write prose fiction; the why is elusive. Or, it’s something that changes depending on my mood and what I’ve been reading. Flannery O’Connor wrote in an essay that a writer tries to find the crossroads of time, place, and eternity — which I think means that a writer situates himself in his context, but tries to find the eternal human truths within it. This reinforces a formal writing tradition and regionalism. Tradition is something that I’ve come to terms with in recent years, after an interruption while steeping myself in Marxist, postcolonial, and feminist criticisms. These criticisms have important contributions to reading and interpretation, but they don’t supplant the fact that literature has a history that must be understood by the writer. A filthy, human history, but a history nonetheless.

I struggled more with regionalism. I grew up in what I considered a pretty bland, monocultural, white suburban environment in the South. No one had southern accents on their tongues; we sounded like people on TV. We had the same plastic garbage in our homes as the rest of Middle America. I yearned to get out and go somewhere more interesting, like New York, London, Paris, Buenos Aires, Tokyo. I read mostly European or New York writers. I hated that the gold standard of writers in Texas were Larry McMurtry and Katherine Anne Porter, two writers who are undeniably good, but don’t have the immortal status of some Northeastern writers like Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman, let alone the European masters. I figured I was born into a dead part of the world where the people just didn’t have a taste for literature.

But, after growing older and living in other parts of the country I’ve since realized that this despair was most likely a defense mechanism from trying to do something as difficult and mysterious as writing. Faulkner certainly didn’t grow up in a wellspring of literary creativity, but by living closely to his part of the world he could produce works that put most New York writers to shame and envy. Writing, and especially writing prose, is as much about communication as it is sophisticated aesthetics — communication not to the elite editors in New York and London, but to the people one lives among and describes. Tim Parks wrote lamentably about the way in which globalization in literature has produced a great converging of form and style instead of relishing in the differences among regions of the world. Everyone is writing for a “global audience” now, which is most likely whatever The New Yorker and the Nobel committee say it to be.

For my own part, I’m trying to study the tradition of prose fiction a bit closer, beginning with the English novel and then American fiction, and finally the writers who wrote about the areas I saw in my childhood, whether on car trips to see my grandfather in Arkansas or running through the woods behind my childhood home in the suburbs of Houston, TX. And I’m trying to learn the forms, as if I were a beginner at tai chi. Slow and clumsy to quick and confident.