In which dinosaurs, oil, and drilling come together to make fiction happen
Sometimes I bother myself with questions to which there are no solid answers. What’s down the throat of a blackhole? Why don’t I ever put myself to bed at a decent hour? Where does good fiction writing come from?
And bad fiction writing? Maybe it comes from Amazon. Maybe the mall. Who cares?
I do mean “Where does it come from?” in the cultural sense, yes, like big picture. But actually, I’m most curious about each individual writer. Even me.
I’m wondering this all the more now because my fifth collection of short stories, The Realm of the Dog, comes out next month from J. New Books. And frankly, I’d just like to have an answer for folks when they give me wrinkle-nosed looks and ask, “Where do you get this stuff?” Where do I get this stuff? Can I summon it whenever I want? Does it only arise in inconvenient moments? I have learned to carry my Moleskine to church, to funerals, and when I go fishing. Would it be bulging amygdalae, or some other predisposition? Trauma, ego, boredom? Most writers, including me, in commenting on why they do what they do, say something along the lines of, “I don’t know, but I can’t not do it.”
It sounds awfully glamorous to be possessed by such an ideal. It’s a drag, actually. It’s hard and it hurts. It messes up your life and the lives of your loved ones and you don’t make any money. It is good, though. Good in the way in which Lewis described Aslan. Not a safe kind of good, but the kind of good with teeth and power.
By the way, I hate quoting or paraphrasing or referencing C.S. Lewis. It’s way too safe of an allusion, ironically. Like, whatsa matter, don’t you know any Dennis Covington? But damn it all. It fits here.
A good many millions of years ago the dinosaurs ran the show. Terrible critters who battled one another all the time, with railroad spikes for teeth and forehead lances and morning stars for tails. Some of them flew, and these needle-faced shadows swooped from the sky to impale upon their beaks anything that pleased them to impale. Some swam, and these ate whales for breakfast. All over, the ancient flora was painted with blood, the ground strewn with viscera, the atmosphere thick with the particulates of doom.
And then a huge meteorite slammed the Yucatan and they all died. In, like, three days or something. Thanks for coming, tip your waitstaff.
But then what happened? The scaly hulks, for a time, just lay there, milky eyed. A bunch of busted thunder lizard tyrant kings. Newly minted substrates for the K—Pg boundary. And the rains came down and the floods came up. And the sun beat down and landslides whipped through and snow and volcanoes and further attacks from rocks from space. The grand assault of unimaginable time. Down they went, century by century, further through the skin of the earth, millennia by millennia, mashed and macerated by ghastly processes, the same that shove continents along their courses over never-ending seas of magma.
And then the humans came. With slinkies and nukes and Blockbuster Video. Not necessarily in that order. And cars. The humans had cars too. And gasoline makes those suckers go and 10W-30 keeps the engine parts limber. So, humans started stabbing the ground until crude oil, like an arterial bleed, shot up from miles below. BUT WHERE DID ALL THAT CRUDE OIL COME FROM?!
The dinosaurs, thank you very much. But it didn’t come from the dinosaurs. It IS the dinosaurs. Not so scaly and lethal anymore, and in liquid form. But now useful to humans in a thousand ways. Important and, eventually, essential.
It works the same way, more or less, with fiction writing. It’s a bit too pat, in this analogy, to say that the dinosaurs are the writer’s memories. Rather, the dinosaurs are something like eternal totems in the writer’s brain, morphing in conscious availability as time marches on, yet never not infused with the essences they came with when they first smashed into the writer’s sensibilities. Out there, the umbrella term is “events.” A car crash in Uncle Mike’s Chevy. The day Dad left Mom for his secretary. When Grandma’s cancer totally disappeared for seemingly no reason. The house fire we all barely survived. They’re initially cached in the brain’s reserves as memories and memories have structures that, at least at first, keep them intact.
But the longer we hold an event in our minds, and perhaps the more emotionally affecting it is, the more digest-able it is too. So that when, years later, the fear that the car crash in Uncle Mike’s Chevy produced comes rocketing to the surface, it’s freed from the constraints of “car crash” and useful to the writer in any way the writer may need. The totem is no longer literally the memory of the actual crash, and the scene over which the writer is laboring doesn’t likely involve cars crashing. Yet the scene is soaked in dark tangibility. “The fear seems so real,” the reader might say, and why? Because it is.Â
Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, 2021) and The Museum of Heartache (Pski’s Porch Publishing, 2021.) He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia and lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.