Whalesong

The book that will change my life is the one I am writing now.

That sounds incredibly arrogant. Let me try again.

The book that will hopefully change my life is the one I’m attempting to write now.

Better—still pretentious. But anyone who decides to blog about their literary aspirations is already hemorrhaging pretention, so let’s just jump right in.

Well, perhaps some backtracking first.

There are so many books I could choose to write about for this topic—hundreds, probably. I would most likely need to start before the beginning, with all the books my parents have read over the years, because where would I be if they didn’t have a voracious love of reading to pass down to me? Perhaps I should go back to the books we read every night before bed (Wombat Stew and The Baby Uggs Are Hatching) or the ones we read together out loud when I was a little older (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia).

Maybe it needs to be the books I fell in love with as a child and read ten, twenty, even fifty times and never grew tired of, the ones that kept my nose glued to the pages instead of enjoying the Hawaiian-Californian-Western-Mountain landscapes during family vacations (Mom and Dad probably didn’t think their active work to make me love reading would backfire in quite that way—I think they were counting on me being carsick if I tried to read in the car). The pages of the Thoroughbred Series are ripped at the corners, yellowed with age, and stained with orange fingerprints from years of Cheetos picked up from roadside gas stations.

I could talk about my 11^th grade AP English class, where I learned what literary analysis meant and discovered that I was quite possibly rather good at it. Gatsby and Macbeth and a haunting poem called The Waking by Theodore Roethke ganged up on me and forced my hand—when I made the jump to college a few years later, it would be as an English major.

I could expound at length on the books I read during classes with Dr. Christopher Armitage at UNC, the English professor who defended his thesis to Tolkein AND C. S. Lewis on the same exam board and was pretty much a rock star in my eyes. His classes were challenging and demanding, and he was a reportedly hellacious grader—and I used to squirm in his class as he read my essays out loud to show the other students what an A paper should look like. He was the person who made me realize that 11^th grade AP English had not led me wrong.

I could wax expansively about the authors I love today—Gaiman and Rowling and Dessen and Koen and Pierce and Grossman and always, always Mr. William Shakespeare.

But now that I’ve written all of this, I think I know where I should have started all along: Christmas, 1992. Age six. Santa brought a book called Whalesong for me, an epic novel detailing the life and adventures and love of Hruna, a humpback whale. This book spoke to me in a way that nothing had before. It’s been probably 15 years since I touched this book, and I can still remember some of the whale songs—Around and over and under the sea, come oh come white whale to me, or Deep in my heart I breathe deeply with you, the breath of the one who made you and keeps you. It wriggled into the deepest part of me and stuck. It was all I could think about. I wanted more. I needed more.

I decided I would write more.

At the age of six, I started writing my own epic novel about a talking humpback whale. Same basic setup as Whalesong, original characters. Later I would discover the ever-entertaining, often-sordid world of fan fiction and realize that in 1992, I was pretty much a pioneer of the genre. I crafted eight single-spaced pages of rousing text. It was a true work of genius.

The novel was unfinished, and a few years later at a rowdy birthday party a girl knocked over the old Mac in the basement and relegated my story to the void, but that was the beginning.

That was the beginning. After that, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to write a novel.

I want to write a novel.

I am writing a novel.

This is the book that will change my life.

This week’s synchroblog topic was a book that changed my life. You can read the other entries here:

The Creative Collective