ABOVE: Me.
In two weeks time, I will head to New York City where I teach a low-residency MFA writing course in Harlem, helping writers to write, which is ironic because I have been stuck on a novel of my own for some time now.
Forty years, to be exact.
This is what I have so far:
“It was a dark and stormy life.”
The list of peoples that my new novel is going to save is long and varied. It will honor their pasts, ensure their futures, bring to the fore their frustrations, pains, hopes and fears and make the world see them, at last, as human beings.
The list keeps growing. Every day, I add four or five more. If I read news or go on social media, I can add twice that.
In addition to saving various peoples, of course, my new novel will shed light upon a number of pressing social issues. That number is currently 4,823, but that list keeps growing as well. The difficult part is that it won’t just shed light on those issues, it will solve them. None of my “How To Write a Novel” books really cover how to do that, so I’m kinda out here on my own.
The last time I was in NYC, I walked past Rockefeller Center, past the enormous statue of Atlas, carrying the world on his shoulders. The statue is called Atlas, but I wonder now as I continue to not-work on my Novel That Will Save the World if it might also be called Writer’s Block.
I wonder if for some writers, it’s not that we have nothing to write about, but that we hope too much for what our writing will do. We would like, most of us, to leave the world a better place than we found it. As my children become young men now and head off on their own, that mission seems even more critical. I want to save them. I want to save everyone. Jesus had the right idea, right up until the whole “I am the son of Man” thing. But it’s worth remembering that Atlas didn’t chose to hold up the world.
It was a curse.
It was a punishment.
And in the original myth, it wasn’t Earth he was holding, it was Uranus.
Which is even funnier.
Orwell struggled with this in his essay, “Inside the Whale” - to be inside the whale, like Henry Miller, writing one’s self without regard? Or to be outside the whale, to write of the wars and violence and horrors around the whale? Orwell makes no final determination - it’s a continuum, of course, sometimes we write one way, sometimes the other. But in these days of endless scrolling, doom and ever-present news media, it seems outside the whale is where my writing - to continue Orwell’s aquatic metaphor - drowns.
Outside the whale, it is a dark and stormy life. But that’s not all of life, and undoubtedly not even the most important part of it.
This is particularly true in the early stages of writing, or any creative pursuit, when being outside the whale is particularly dangerous. Even now, I can imagine a commenter, resolutely outside the whale, responding to this very post, reminding me that whales are endangered and the ocean is despoiled and the EPA is being gutted, so what are you gonna write about now, Mister Entitled Writer?
To which I respond, where’s a Great White when you need one?
And so in two weeks, I will travel to New York, where I will swing by old Atlas again, before heading uptown to advise my students, and remind myself, to let it drop.
To try, for just a little while, to put the damned world down.
Yours in the Fetal Position,
S.
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