The Whale Belly

My father-in-law told me a story years ago about how he was drafted, and all the boys in the surrounding towns had to report to a recruiting office in Luling, Texas. When they were asked if there was any reason that they could not serve, a rising wave of young men blurted out that they were gay. I began with that scene, but it wasn’t the story so much as the dock to launch the real story out there in uncharted water. I didn’t know what it would be beforehand, but it ended up being a story about the conflicting values of a young conscientious objector and his traditional rancher father. I could tell that the story was powerful, but I also knew that I wasn’t quite up to the task of doing it justice. I made my way to the end, sentence by sentence, and though I knew it was missing so much, I was pleased with the essence of it. There were some good ideas in it, too. But the greatest discovery was an impetus to better learn the craft of writing. I learned that a writer doesn’t learn the craft in order to invent stories, but he learns it in order to do justice to the ones that already exist to him.

And I do have many stories, I just never thought they were worth spending time writing down. But I’ve found when I do write them down the significance of them emerges unexpectedly. I have to remind myself that no one would think Raymond Carver background would be a great source of stories, but now it’s an enviable thing amongst writers to be from a working-class small town.

People, memories, moments that don’t seem to mean much, these are fertile sources of stories. Fiction has a way of reaching past mere experience to render it into something that speaks to a bigger truth, without of course ruining the effect with sterile didacticism.

Maybe that’s what I was getting at in my post about characters being more important than plot points. It’s all about how people go about their days, the choices they make, the things they say, their motives. Despite reductive truths of sociology and psychology, we’re strange beings with toes and fingers and teeth. We’re shameful and prideful and communicate with patterned sounds. All of it, even the most mundane, is a miracle. We take it for granted, but it’s a miracle.

The fifty-something woman waiting tables at Denny’s, the boy hunched over his iPad, the professor who applies lipstick before her evening class. All of it just a weird miracle, none of it really making any sense. And in fiction we watch it unfold on the page and, though it might not make sense, it might just be significant.