The Whale Belly

I spent the morning writing a story from start to finish. It began as a fairy tale, an old woman and her granddaughter living in a secluded cottage in the woods, blah blah blah, then it devolved into rape, torture, insanity, and murder. Afterwards I went on a run and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. Why would I do such things to such characters? I remembered when I was a kid I would derive an open-mouthed pleasure from burning ants with a magnifying glass. You know what I would think of that kid now if I saw him on the sidewalk, squatting and salivating over his quarry? A real piece of shit. Then I’d be bothered all day about calling a child a piece of shit, even if only in my mind.

I think I just get bored or nervous when what I know that what I’m writing isn’t going to be very good, so I bring in something shockingly horrific to spice things up. I hope it will mean something later, but it never does.

I remember years ago I wrote a story about a down and out ventriloquist who buried his favorite puppet in this little girl’s casket because she loved the puppet so much. Then he argues with his ex-wife and in a fit drives out into the desert. He pulls over, gets out of his car, and simply wanders out into the wasteland until he dies a gruesome death from exposure. The final image is of ants drinking the juice from his eyeballs. I sent the story to a friend of mine who was also trying to be a writer and was having much, much more success at it. He replied that the ending was “infuriatingly insipid.” I was mad, but of course he was right. I just didn’t know what else to do with this puppeteer other than to incinerate him under the magnifying glass.

In an undergraduate creative writing class I had a character have a sad sexual encounter with someone he always fantasized about, a potentially interesting story, but in the final scene he cuts the throat of a transgender art performer in a park, in front of everybody, again for no real reason other than it kind of came to mind and I needed something spectacular to end on. I don’t think I even explained why he had the razor on him.

Then there was a story about a dental student who rushes his wife in labor to a hospital, for a child he doesn’t want, ends with him walking out of the hospital, looking up, and seeing a man hang himself from an office building, the noose decapitating him and his body splattering on the sidewalk. The story opened with him strangling a rabbit to death, but that had more of a point. I’m confident about that.

Okay, at some point I guess it’s pretty funny that I have this strange habit of bringing dramatic acts of violence out of nowhere. I swear I’m a decent person in my real life, but I’m sure if I showed my writing to wrong person a dossier with my name on it might appear in some unmarked building.

Of course, there are writers who do violence well. Four-fifths of O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a story about a family struggling to love each other while on a road trip. Then suddenly they get in a freak car accident only to be viciously murdered by a gang of escaped convicts. The Misfit shoots the grandmother three times in the chest and she sinks into a ditch on the side of the road, and he says something grimly philosophical to close out the story.

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
“Some fun!” Bobby Lee said.
“Shut up, Bobby Lee” The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”

It’s beautiful, strangely perfect, but at first I had no idea why. I still don’t, really. But it’s something to do with how evil can surprise us, how fragile and weak most of us are, and because of that we should love people when we can.

But the violence in my stories serves to propel lifeless stories forward. All sensation, completely immoral, i.e. completely worthless. Pretty boring, too. Violence and sex may be natural inclinations when hoping to lure others to like your stories. There’s nothing wrong with sex and violence in stories, to be clear, but when the end is only to titillate, it’s a pretty cynical way to spend one’s time, not to mention nihilistic.