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!

Plot Vs. Character

Plot versus setting.  Artist versus craftsman.  Lamott's Bird by Bird versus Burroway's Imaginative Writing.  Not so useful versus very useful.  Lamott and Burroway cover very different topics this week.  I found Lamott’s passages inspirational but perplexing from my perspective of an aspiring author.

As Lamott states, “Plot grows out of character.” If an author focuses on doing the best job possible in defining a character then the actions of the character “will fall into place.”  The author needs to listen to her characters who will whisper into her ear what the plot line is by the nature of their interactions.  I wish my characters would speak a little louder, possibly even scream.  I suspect I am having problems with this concept because my characters are not well defined.  Until I thoroughly understand my characters, I won’t know which actions will result from their interactions—which, come to think of it, is exactly what Lamott says.

Here’s another twist.  In my book in progress about Theodore Roosevelt’s children and their pony Algonquin, the plot is already written; the facts are well documented.  What I am discovering is that which “facts” I choose to include can have widely different implications for character.  Theodore Roosevelt stated that every day of his second marriage he felt more in love with his wife Edith and their children.  As president, he kept the hour from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. sacrosanct so he could play with his children regardless of the demands of his office.  Yet while organizing the Rough Riders during the Spanish American War, he left his second wife Edith who was extremely ill saying that even if she died in his absence, he needed to perform his duty to his country.  I suspect that great, complex characters like Theodore Roosevelt involve great, complex contradictions.  My challenge is how to create Lamott’s “scenic Easter egg” view into the life of Roosevelt and his family—to create the hidden jeweled surprise of a Fabergé egg rather than the empty interior of a single color hen’s egg.

I found Lamott’s sharing of Alice Adam’s formula ABDCE (Action, Background, Development, Climax, Ending) for writing a short story extremely valuable.  I had a vague sense of this arc for plot development but would never have been able to articulate it.  I plan on revising my ending of the Algonquin book by fine tuning the sequence according to this formula.

Burroway claims that establishing the setting--the time and place of a story--“fuels the drive to write.”   A believable setting is created by careful selection of details and using vocabulary typical of that era or social environment.  In Ives’ short story “The Philadelphia,” his characters order beer using “Bud” instead of “Budweiser” and revel in the profane language typical of men at bars.  Careful word choice can also help establish tone and emotion when creating a setting.  I tried to use this concept when writing about Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt and the aerial salute to their dead son Quentin by focusing on a fading rose, tormented leaves, and the remorseless fall of the memorial wreaths.

Borrowing the cinematographic concept of panning in (or out) from a scene, per Burroway, can also help establish setting.  Joan Didion in “At the Dam” does a masterful job of using this technique as she writes about the Hoover dam--from the image in her inner eye to taking a tour of the dam to the dam as a place of giant machines working almost independently of man to the star map locating the Hoover Dam at a time when man no longer exists.  I also used this panning out concept in my weekly writing—going from a single rose petal to Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt in the Pet Cemetery to the aerial salute over the house at Sagamore Hill.

Is writing an art or is it a craft?  As a new author, I am finding that using craftsman-like techniques such as the ABDCE formula and panning in and out is helping me more at this time of my development.  I need to keep working at my craft until I achieve master status as an artist.