Putting the Octopus to Bed--Writing as Spawning

My perceived need to write perfection is like
an octopus  trapping me in the edit process.
(1801 Drawing by Pierre de Montfort: Wikipedia)

Margaret Drabble describes the start of a draft as ideas floating about, mostly in one’s unconsciousness.  “Things…suddenly start to swim together and to stick together, and I think ‘Ah, that’s a novel beginning.’”  Some of the more primitive sea creatures have a similar approach to “novel beginnings” but it’s called spawning.  As authors, we want to tap into the creative sides of our brain yet structure the output to spawn beautiful babies.  We go through a continual iterative process of creating and revising—hoping each new generation is an improvement and not a nonviable mutation.  Some of my more successful sections in my book-in-progress, Rough Riding through the White House: Adventures of the Pony Algonquin and the Roosevelt Children, started with images sparked by my readings that I could not get out of my head.  The image of a boy and his pony riding through the gravestones of Arlington National Cemetery--the basis of my chapter "The Pony in the City of the Dead"-- represented to me the juxtaposition of youthful potential and life cut short, innocence of play and horror of war, boyhood hero worship and fatherly ambition.  Somehow I knew this could be a pivotal scene, what Richard Hugo calls “the triggering town”, to help me explore the associated emotions, connections, and themes of the relationship between Roosevelt and his son.

To make the scene convincing requires what Burroway in Imaginative Writing calls “imaginative research.” When researching historical fiction, Mary Lee Settle suggests reading “in the period” not “about the period.”   The only way I found out about Archie and Algonquin riding through the City of the Dead was via email correspondence with the research librarian of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library.  She discovered the earliest mention of Algonquin, which was the cemetery scene, reported by only one newspaper.  Filling out the scene required skimming 30 to 40 newspaper articles from May 29, 1902, to June 2, 1902. Thank goodness for the Library of Congress National Newspaper Archive and Boolean searches. After all this research, I reshaped the information, as Burroway suggests, to “let it feed your piece, not devour it.”  My first draft of the Decoration Day scene was organized around each step of the President’s trip to Arlington Cemetery; it even included the road names.  I learned to toss aside my notes and start the draft as if it were a story informed, not dictated, by the facts.  Of course, Algonquin was nickering in my ear “Start with me and Archie riding between the gravestones.”   

And then comes revision.  If Dante, in some alternate universe of time and space, ever had to rewrite his Divine Comedy into modern English, I am certain that he would add a level to Hell called “revision.”  It is not so much the time that it takes—although that can be horrific—or the recognition that your first draft is shitty in Lamott’s words but the frequent necessity of drowning your own babies.  The poet Rita Mae Reese reveals that she must write 10 to 20 “failed” poems and 20 to 30 “competent” poems to achieve one “lasting” poem.  Her poem success rate averages out to approximately the survival rate of broadcast spawning by sea cucumbers. 

I feel that my successful spawn rate is closer to that of the limpet.  I estimate that I have invested almost 40 hours in research and four rewrites, or what Lamott in Bird by Bird calls false starts, in the three-page preface to my Algonquin book.  I am going to lay this piece aside now and work on completing the book.  As Lamott suggests, I need to get to know my characters, “to hang with them long enough to see beyond all the things they aren’t” such as geoducks.  When I return to the book, I am certain that the preface will require another total rewrite.

After revision comes line editing and getting critical feedback.  Among my problems at this stage are “varying sentence length” plus “long winded,” “adjective heavy,”  and “melodramatic” language.  Plus I need a serious refresher on comma usage.  All of these are fixable at the next stage of hell, or um revision.  That brings me to Lamott’s comments on determining when the book or short story is done.  According to her simile of putting the octopus to bed, the story will always reach out for more revisions.   So to paraphrase Lamott, this is the very best I can do now.  Night, night octopus!