The Writer As Paleontologist
"I went back to the office and sat in my swivel chair and tried to catch up on my foot-dangling." - Raymond Chandler, 'The Big Sleep'
But first, your weekly Vine: Monday was Chapter 47: “Correspondence With The Dead Part Two.” Tuesday was Chapter 48: “End Of The Line, Western Jefferson Line.” Today is Chapter 49: “Correspondence With The Dead Part Three.” This week wraps up the 1980s, a pivotal time in the town of Vine. Listening to the podcast is a quick way to catch up if you’re behind, and don’t forget to sign up for the weekly newsletter!
It’s worthwhile to show humility before your work. Maybe this is what all those invocations to The Muse were about. I’ve said before I believe all the novels/stories/poems/albums I am ever going to write already exist out there in the aether, waiting to be uncovered. When I die, my bibliography/discography will be a record of what I went out and found, polished up, and presented.
If “the aether” is too ethereal or makes you think of a Thor you wish you’d forgotten, think of it as like digging for fossils. You spend hours brushing dirt off a bone, thinking it’s a Stegosaurus arm. You’re careful, you’re meticulous, and each brush of dirt and rock and debris reveals more and more pure, good Stegosaurus arm. You finally get the thing out of the ground, show it to your faithful Laura Dern, and she says “oh rad, a Parasaurolophus ankle!” Quickly recovering—can’t have Laura Dern thinking you’re stupid—you say “it sure is!” Then you take it to DNA sequencing, and DNA sequencing says “congrats on your ankylosaurus spine!” Eventually, you get a novel.
A Note On Non-Empiricism
At heart, I’m too Protestant-to-the-core to be 100% serious on this wuwu stuff. At the same time, I’m not so dismissive of the unseen or unexplainable. I’ll never mess with a Ouija board because I like thinking it could summon a ghost, without finding out. Life is a lot like magic realism: the empirical explanation might make the most sense, but don’t discount what you don’t understand.
Regardless, to pre-empt lawyers and end-copyright weirdos: you, the artist, are the creator of your art. It’s your brain doing the work. Take pride in yourself. All I’m saying is that shifting my own thinking from a kind of authoritarian, God-like perception of myself as The Author and to a more serve-at-the-pleasure-of-the-text model has taken a lot of pressure off of editing.
Dino DNA
Remember the Bone Wars? It was back in the early years of Paleontology. Two feuding jagoffs, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, were in a competition to see who could dig up the most dino bones and discover the most dino species. They’d go to great lengths to sabotage dig sites or each other, even blowing up some sites (and the bones included therein). They’d also dig up a skeleton, slap whatever skull they wanted to on top, and call it a new find. In literary terms, it’d sorta be like if L. Ron Hubbard and Dilbert Guy had a competition to out-publish the other, and there was also dynamite involved.
I bring up these two dino-doofuses because the “slap on a skull on whatever skeleton and call it a new dinosaur” thing happens a lot with writing. You think you’re writing a novella, turns out it’s a flash fiction. You start writing a sestina, but realize you mean to write a sonnet. You think you’re writing a spy movie, but then William Goldman tells you to cut that shit out, and you get Good Will Hunting.
It’s disheartening to edit a whole novel down to, like a 2,500 word short story. It’s disheartening to write a what you think is a great short story, only to be told “not enough here, turn this into a novella.” But you need to make sure the skull matches the skeleton. Think of those big edits as less “more work I have to do” and more “I need to get to know this work better, the work has not fully revealed itself yet.”
A Personal Example
Let’s talk about my novel, which is a weird thing because it’s not finished yet, much less out and available for you to read. I’ve been struggling with it for over a decade now, partially for personal reasons that are another column, and partially because I’ve had trouble finding the right skull for its skeleton. When I started it, the vision was kind of a Jesus’ Son-meets-The Office (US) thing, straightforward prose, first-person present tense, that “voice of a guy telling you stories at a bar” that young white men love to write in. Even at 23, I knew I was in hack territory. I outlined it, though, wrote (most) of it. Then I left that notebook on a Southwest flight, repeated the process (somehow less successfully), slipped further into burnout, and oh yeah that was gonna be another column.
During one of these drafts, I played around and added a second narrator. That felt right. I played around and opened a chapter with a poem. Then I kept writing poems, because that felt right.
Always wanted to do a novel in verse, I thought.
Then, summer 2022, I sat down and filled a notebook with a draft of the novel. In verse. Somehow, it felt like I’d never bothered to ask this novel what its favorite color was, and now I knew it was powder blue.
The text had gone from two narrators to five. I put it away, feeling better than I ever had. Time for it to marinade. About three months later, it hit me: five narrators wasn’t right. Too much. I was grateful for what those characters had revealed about themselves to me, but not all them are gonna get first-person chapters.
Currently, I’m in the process of excavating what I think is the right skeleton with the right skull: two narrators, novel-in-verse. This is absolutely better than I’ve ever felt about the project, I know the characters better, I understand the stakes more clearly. I even feel better than when I had the initial spark of an idea for the project. This is what is meant, I think, when we say “an idea in fiction is nothing, it’s all about execution.” That idea was a cool idea, fun to think about for an afternoon. This would’ve been back when I was working on the boat, so picture a really irritating version of me, age 23, probably at the Billy Goat Tavern, crumpled cheeseburger wrapper and whiskey neat next to a Moleskine notebook. Isn’t it so much better that that version of me isn’t putting the finishing touches on this draft? No wonder these characters were initially cagey towards me.
Benefits Of This Approach
I’m not saying you should take 12 years with your next novel, for the record.
For me, this change in approach morphs the Inner Voice Of Doubt from “I’m not good enough, I can’t write,” to “I have not spent enough time letting this piece reveal itself to me.” Revision, or hell, even re-reading what I wrote the day before used to be impossible to me. This is not a new feeling for writers, of course. It was completely debilitating for me, though—the self-doubt and self-loathing and John-Malkovich-in-Whiplash-style dressing-down I would give myself, dudes. I didn’t even see Whiplash and that’s how bad my inner editor was.
If you think of the text as its own entity, something you are in partnership with, something you can understand more deeply as your relationship with it grows—suddenly, all that bad writing (all those uses of ‘suddenly?’) feels like a misunderstanding. A cute little mix-up between you and your WIP, a stumbling block on your way to wedding publication day, rather than a “complete indictment on your career choice and a referendum on whether or not you were ever talented at all.” Aw, hell. Try it for yourself, let me know what you think. What the hell do I know, though.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
