Wrestling with Melville, wrestling with myself

FINDING TIME to regularly maintain a blog is hard enough; I work long hours, I do my share of the housework, there’s relationship-maintenance time with my wife and my close friends. I try to keep up on my other reading, prep for my Tuesday night game, and a thousand other little things that distract me from writing. And I try to divide my writing time between Moby&Me and other projects. It’s difficult.

All writers write for an audience. I joked with friends when I first began to kick around the idea of doing this project – back in November of 2007 – that it was really a cynical exercise on my part to write a book without actually having to sit down and write a book, kind of the antithesis of the Julie/Julia Project.

In truth, I wasn’t sure if I had a reading of Moby-Dick in me. I couldn’t get a quarter through The Eustace Diamonds (or for that matter, most mid-nineteenth century male-authored English novels longer than about 220 pages – I don’t seem to have a problem with the George Eliots and Charlotte Brontes). I thought making the kind of commitment that a blog demands would keep me focused on churning though Moby. The fact is, though, that the reading is a breeze – it's the writing that's a chore.

Or to be precise, coming up with something to say is a chore. That is, coming up with something to say that isn’t a synopsis of the action, or some hackneyed observation that a dozen scholars have made more eloquently than I have, or something so esoteric that I come across like a self-aggrandizing prat. I don’t want every entry to turn into a précis of the chapter in question – other people have already done that much more eloquently and succinctly than I ever could (see links on the top of the left hand column). So I read over each chapter twice usually; then I think about it for a couple of days, let it soften up in my mind – slow-cook it until the meaning is falling off the bone. Then I write something that I hope will have some meaning to somebody if anyone ever actually reads it.

It’s a struggle, like Jacob wrestling with the angel. You want the blessing, the kernel of truth hiding in the text, so you keep struggling. But doubts continually dog you. You begin to think, “Do I really get this?” “Do I have anything worthwhile to say?” And eventually, “Am I wasting my time.”

It’s ironic; I don’t know which I find more discouraging – the thought that maybe I’ll get through the whole project without anyone ever reading it, or the thought that someone will read it and realize it’s crap. I’ve written over three hundred reviews, articles and interviews for university newspapers and online magazines. I never worried about what people thought about any of it. Maybe it’s because the weblog is such an immediate, personal medium. Maybe it’s because there’s no editor or proof-reader between me, the “author", and you, reading this. Maybe it’s because I'm a little less than a hundred pages into my second Melville novel and, like any fan, I want to do the book justice.