Expert Over Interest and How to Finish Your Book!
There is a famous Melville quote where the famously tortured and under appreciated writer talks about theme. He says that in order to “write a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”
Certainly, no one would argue with the might of Melville’s great white whale, which is only rivaled by the might of body required to lift a hard cover edition of the book itself. Regardless, Mellville’s assertion is admirable and implies how he felt about his own work, which was not validated until long after his death. And though, the writer journeyman is said to have been somewhat insecure, to have sat for all those hours on all those days sopping the blood of Ishmael’s story with parchment is undeniable proof that Melville knew his story would be a mighty one.
If you are a writer yourself, you know this because you know that sitting down to write is the hardest part about writing. So many times what stops us from doing just this is the doubt we have about our themes and motifs. When we do finally muster the audacity to sit down at the keyboard, the idea that seemed to be a great potential book concept can easily begin to reveal itself as one that is completely compromised structurally. Hashing out the details, we start to concede that this levy is imminently cracked and not nearly solid enough to do the job of holding readers back from where they want to go and redirecting them to the place where they need to end up.
Having started and stopped and restarted many works for the exact reasons outlined above, and now that I’ve seen a few of those through to the end, I think I have begun to understand the nature of confidence with regards to what I write and how it contributes to whether or not I press on with a concept.
Here is the bottom line: you will always, always, always be most comfortable and confident writing the story that you have lived.
This is why Melville didn’t think twice about including the large chunk of Moby Dick that is almost entirely concerned with the nuance of the whaling industry and only minimally additive to the plot of he story. For him, a former whaler, that shit was fascinating, and because he had lived it, he was able to provide insight to that world in a language that is exclusive of that world.
I’m a firm believer that if a work of literature is authentic, written with perspective that your reader cannot gain from another work, then it doesn’t really matter what the subject of that book is or if it is superficially interesting to the masses.
I believe this is what makes Moby Dick one of the most dreaded and rewarding literary experiences in the American cannon. It is not the whale or the extreme man vs. nature motif that is mighty, but the truth in the narrative.
Authenticity like this is created in a couple of ways, the most notable of which is what I call expert vernacular. Every obscure facet of life has a language associated with it. As a poet, this fascinates me and I love the way words are turned on their head, both in meaning and function, when used in certain subsets of humanity. These vernaculars are not learnable in the way that you can learn French in American high schools. In other words, there are no levels at which you can use vernacular; there is only expert. I’ve spoken about this before, and have pretty much a whole chapter on the concept in my ebook, which you can download here (shameless promo!).
But the gist of all of it, the answer to the question, how do you become expert, is this: You live your life. The message here is not go out and find an interesting faction of life to immerse yourself in so you can write about it. The message is instead to write about what you have already lived, and what you are already expert in. Fear not if you believe your expertise to be mundane. Authenticity beats interesting when interesting isn’t authentic. And remember, in the end, what you write is just a vehicle, and the means by which you and your reader arrive at the why.
Christopher Grillo is the author of Elegy for a Star Girl (Swimming with Elephants Press, 2016). His poems appear in Drunk Monkeys, Sport Literate, Biline, Spry, Aethlon, and more. Grillo is a graduate of the University of New Haven where he played strong safety for the Chargers. He lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut as an 8th grade language arts teacher, and moonlights as an assistant football coach at his high school alma mater.
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