The Whale Belly

For this post I want to flesh out my method for growing as a writer as it stands right now. This will be difficult because I don’t really know what it is at the moment; I hope by writing this I’ll have some more clarity.

The first thing is to continue these raw and effortless musings on the blog; I think they help with the nimbleness of thinking through my fingertips. I’m already noticing I have an increased sense of ease when I sit down to write these posts, and I’m also noticing the same compulsive urge nagging me to write that I began to sense when I started running regularly. So, I definitely want to continue doing this for the time being, perhaps extending my writing sessions by a few minutes or so each week, or so.

Secondly, I’m trying to think of the writing of fiction like learning tai chi. I’ve been reading Josh Waitzkin’s book about learning and he describes his development with tai chi and martial arts as “making smaller circles,” meaning he began with slow, clumsy movements, and over time learned to move more exact, confidently, and intuitively. In the same way I want to figure out the broad strokes of fictional prose: character and setting — assuming plot is fiction, as Brooks and Warren say, or maybe it was John Gardner… Anyway, I want to have a character in a place getting into trouble and trying to extricate himself from it. And the best way I can think of making these big circles is by writing in the style of folk and fairy tales, or children’s stories. My hope is that once I get comfortable with the feel of a story arc, I can begin to focus on making more complex characters and explore more complex themes. But first, I just need to tell a simple story from beginning to end.

Lastly, for now, is my method of studying the history of fiction, as per the directive of Flannery O’Connor. I’m reading Pilgrim’s Progress as an example of the proto-novel, and I have to say I’m enjoying it much more than I thought I would. I guess I’m a sucker for moralistic fiction. It reminds me of Gardner’s excellent book On Moral Fiction, but it’s possible that he held it up as a poor example of the type of moral fiction he meant. But for me, any story of someone who faces the adversity of pilgrimage because it is better than being weighed down by the burden of his daily life, and who ultimately learns about truth and about himself, is a pretty good and edifying story for me. And it presents in stark display the idea of increasing internal and external conflicts leading to a point of illumination.

But I digress. So I’m reading a couple of protean English novels, then diving into Defoe and basically reading the major English novels chronologically from the eighteenth century up to the modernists, where I’ll probably switch over to the Americans. Once I hit the moderns, I’ll maybe go back and forth between the two nations or continue the focused reading. I also need to think about how I will incorporate other European novels of the nineteenth century in translation.

And I’ll end here with a more of a wishful aspiration than a real plan. I would love to be able to read literature in French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Russian — also Greek and Latin. It’s ambitious and I’ve failed over and over again to maintain a foreign language study. But hopefully once I get some other aspects of my life figured out, my writing will benefit from foreign language study.