I committed a blog-writing blunder two weeks ago. In a hurry to get my weekly blog out on time, I posted a “Part One” without having written a decent Part Two. Last week when I tried to flesh out the second part, I came to realize that a followup piece was going to be difficult. For twenty years, I have avoided writing projects that come with a deadline, and now I’d put a deadline on myself.
My solution to the problem was to kick the can down the road. I rationalized that Part One and Part Two don’t have to be sequential. Rather than posting a weak Part Two immediately after Part One, I decided to wait a week, write an unrelated blog in the interim, and hope inspiration would strike. Now two weeks have passed, and the draft for Part Two remains as unsalvageable as ever. If not for the fact that it is a “Part Two,” it would have found its way to my reject pile days ago.
Here is how I wrote myself into a corner:
After reading James,* Percival Everett’s retelling of Huckleberry Finn, I thought I could compare my writing to Mark Twain’s. More specifically, I saw a parallel between Twain’s writing about the adventures of Huck and Jim to my current writing about the education of my Taiwanese American daughter. I thought, “Here are two white guys trying to understand a subculture different from their own.”
Why did I think that comparing my writing to Mark Twain’s would be a good idea? I could have just as well compared my bank account to Warren Buffett’s and my good looks to Ryan Gosling’s. (For readers who don’t know my financial situation, my royalty checks for 2023 totaled $157 and I was happy to get them. For readers who don’t know what I look like, I am a distant cousin to Charles Martin Smith and the family resemblance is discernible.)
I think that the best I can do for Part Two is to mention one lesson I gleaned from the forced comparison between Twain and me – and then leave it at that. The lesson is this: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about Huck’s efforts to understand why his moral values differed from those of the people around him. Sometimes he misinterpreted things. If understanding Clare’s bicultural education is important to me, then I should write about it. I should also accept that, in spite of efforts to be accurate, I am going to get some things wrong. I definitely will get some of the Taiwanese/Chinese content wrong. I may even get some of the American stuff wrong. Good writing is not always about what authors know. Sometimes it is about what they are trying to figure out. As Frank Bruni put it in a recent essay, it is about “intelligent questions, not final answers.”**
There is quite a bit of Huckleberry Finn in me, and I might be wise to let some of it seep into my writing.
* Everett, Percival. 2024. James. New York: Doubleday.
** Bruni, F. April 20, 2024. “The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students Isn’t on the Syllabus.” New York Times. Found at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/opinion/students-humility-american-politics.html.
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