Catching Your White Whale—Writing Your Magnum Opus

Chase Your White Whale. Don't Ever Give Up. You Never Know What You'll Produce.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ve written to date. While I’ve completed ten novels, had one published, am querying another, have a couple in the wings ready to send out and am editing a few more (after many, many revisions already), I haven’t written THE novel that I’ve always wanted to write. There are a few reasons for the why, including figuring out how to tell the story without harming people I know, some of whom I love, some who I couldn’t give two shits about (the novel will be autobiographical), what to tell (should it be from when the drama of my life, as I see it, began as a kid (there was trauma), or should it begin with something less bildungsroman-y?), how I’m going to write it in first person (all of my novels are written in third person except one section of my published novel) without feeling like I’m cheating (I have always thought, for wrong or right, that writing in the first person was cheating—and I’m not alone on that, as I’ve had others, including a New York Times bestselling author, tell me they thought the same way about it), and the biggest hurdle: how honest am I going to allow myself to be without embarrassing myself? What about you? Ever thought about catching Your White Whale—Writing Your Magnum Opus?

Now, as I’m sure you know, since you’re a writer, right? that everything we write is, in some way, autobiographical. Whether we use the names of our friends, places we know, events that happened to us or an acquaintance or that were told to us by someone at a diner late one night over hot coffee and chipped beef (does that even exist in restaurants anymore?), we write what we know. Well, we tell ourselves, that’s a damned interesting story, isn’t it? Maybe I’ll have a go at it. And either we do have a go at it, or we don’t. Or that’s how it works for me, anyway. Except this one fucking novel. This one novel has been the monkey on my back for as long as I’ve been writing. It’s my white whale. It’s the marlin of my life and I’m afraid I’m Santiago, and once I start writing, I’ll realize I’ve gone too far out to sea, which sort of scares me a little; I don’t want to bring home, much less write, a mutilated carcass. I want to bring that giant marlin home, and I want to bring it home in one giant, magnificent piece.

The Old Man and the Sea aside, I grew up, for the most part, in Miami in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, with some years away in New York and Spain. If you know anything about Miami during those years, you know how crazy the place was. I was born in 1972, the year the Miami Dolphins went undefeated (that record still holds, which makes me happy). In January of 1977, it snowed. Yeah, snow, in Miami. Between April 15 and October 31, 1980, the Mariel boatlift brought about 125,000 Cubans to Florida and other parts of the United States. “Those who have no revolutionary genes, those who have no revolutionary blood . . . we do not want them, we do not need them,” Fidel Castro declared in a May 1, 1980, speech. So, 125,000 Cubans bailed, and they ended up in the land of the free. If you’ve ever seen Scarface, you’re aware of how Oliver Stone, the movie’s writer, and Brian DePalma, the movie’s director, portrayed one of the many Marielitos in Al Pacino’s Tony Montana. And since I was there for most of the eighties, I got to witness the Miami Drug War, which has been chronicled as occurring between 1979 and 1986 and was highlighted in the Cocaine Cowboy documentaries, but which, if you’re a local, you pretty much know is a bullshit set of dates. Things slowed down, but they never stopped. Ever.

And that’s where my story, the one I want to write, takes place—between 1985 all the way up to 1995 or so. Ten years, which doesn’t seem like a long time now that I’m in my fifties, but that, at the time, seemed like forever. It’s during those years that I went from being 13 to being 23, a period of time where I saw underage kids pulling up to our junior high school on brand new Ninja motorcycles, where I saw crack, pot, and cocaine for the first time, where kids brought guns to parties and danced with them on slippery floors, where people were getting shot and killed in places where I shopped for my Z Cavariccis and Espadrilles so I could look like Don Johnson on Miami Vice. They were strange times, to say the least. The goal I set for myself is to capture my story, or a story, set in that world. But every time I sit down to write it, I can’t. It slips through my fingers, and it frustrates me. But I’m optimistic. I know, in time, it’ll come.

Writing is funny like that. Jaimy Gordon, who won the National Book Award for Lord of Misrule, was a novel she had basically put in a drawer and forgot about because she thought it would never find an audience. Until she returned to it and won the award. Writing, for many of us, isn’t a quick process. We search for stories, and write them, and we know they’ll take a lot of work, will likely take years of editing to produce something worth publishing, and then, after all that, may never find a home anyway. But as writers we know it’s just part of the process. It’s frustrating, but it is what it is. That’s publishing.

We know that we’ll never “get it right,” we know we’ll never be finished with it, even after it’s published (if it gets published), but we persevere. We rewrite. We edit. We start all over again. We have good days and bad days, but we do not give up. Ever. I think we all have that book that’s always at the back of our minds, even years after writing it, the one that we want to have under our belts. That’s my Miami novel. So much happened during those years of consequence that it’s a hook in me that I can’t shake. And I don’t mind it—I’ll suffer through the time it takes me to formulate my plan, to jot down some notes, to eventually, one day, start the damn thing. I can’t not. And that’s okay. I’ll keep writing novels as I wait for the right moment in time. I’ll keep fretting over my inability to catch that marlin. But I will catch that marlin.

We know that we’ll never “get it right,” we know we’ll never be finished with it, even after it’s published (if it gets published), but we persevere. We rewrite. We edit.

As writers, we write. We write against time. We write stories that are more intelligent than we are. We write books that we’re proud of, and others we put in drawers, never to see the light of day again, because we know they’re not good enough. They were practice. They were things we had to write in order to get past them to write what we really want to write. But we shoot high. We go for the gold. Like Santiago, we’ll fight long after the odds of us achieving our goals look like his shredded marlin. But we do it because the rewards are so worth it. I don’t know when that’ll happen, if it ever does. But I won’t throw the towel in. Ever. And you shouldn’t either. You’ll never know what you can achieve until you put the work in and achieve it. So go forth. Take your time. Write other things. But get back in that boat. Bait your hook. And set out into the sea, alone, with your rod. Your white whale is waiting for you, and it wants you to catch it.

Cully Perlman is an author, blogger, and Substantive Editor. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com