Mapping a Path

Topography first. Then, little by little, rewrite by rewrite, a path through it.

Sometimes, a story grabs you by the shirt and won’t let you go.

That’s how a dear friend describes the experience that led her to write her first novel. (And rewrite it. And then rewrite it again.)

I know what she means, because it’s happened to me. I’m not a writer. Just the lightning rod for a story that must reach its readers at all costs.

Only the story knows what it needs. Only I can listen.

Beginning a new story: walking through a dark doorway and patting the wall for a light switch. There is none. This is a room without electricity. The only way to map it is with your fingertips. Every inch, every bump. If there’s an obstacle, you’ll find it by stumbling over it. You will be bruised.

Topography first. Then, little by little, rewrite by rewrite, a path through it.

Finally, finding new channels through which the plot can flow more quickly. That’s where I am now. Re-arcing the plot: I struggle with it the way I struggled, at the age of eleven, to string the longbow my father kept in the barn. Bracing one bare foot against the butt end of a springy, slippery wand of wood, inching the tip down to meet the braided string. Never succeeding. The bow always bounced back, taut and wiry, full of its own ideas. Stories have a coil and spring like that, like that they must be forced to swell and taper, like that they fight me. Demanding the touch of someone with more muscle, more experience. Someone at least twice my size.

Alfred Stevens, "Study of a Kneeling Boy Bending a Bow"

False Beginning

It's almost a requirement for a first novel: you will throw away at least twenty beginnings before finally arriving at the one you keep.

The beginning I wrote back at the beginning? I’m not sure I even remember that one now.

In the many iterations since then, there have been some first pages I’ve loved. Below is one I had to say goodbye to a few months ago. Not because I didn’t think it was “good,” or even because it doesn’t start at the right place. In fact, it starts at the only place. But it turns out there are other more pressing things readers need to know first. (Maybe especially more pressing things than me showing off my “writing skills.”)

Right now, I am approximately three beginnings on from this one. I don’t know if the one I currently have will be “the” one. It always seems like it is. It never has been yet.

I know the passages authors love are not always their best. Perhaps even the opposite. So although I liked what's below as a first page, I also wonder how wrong I might have been.

("Kill your darlings" is such a cliché that I'm not even going to mention it here -- except to reference this article about who actually said it first.)

The Fasti Antiates Maiores: a Roman calendar from before the Julian reform, c. 60 BC.

1. The Ides of March

Pay close attention, because where this story begins is also where it ends. Same day. Same place. Different only because of what happens in between.

How can this be? Easily enough. Even now time bends, although it’s more convenient to pretend it doesn’t. Back then, when the calendar was new, such things were harder to ignore. Fitting each day into its proper place on the grid wasn’t always as simple as it seemed.

And that day—well.

The Lady Atia had a calendar, of course. They were all the rage that year: Caesar’s latest invention, so scientific it was magical. All the best families were commissioning painted versions of them for their walls. Since the Lady Atia was Caesar’s niece, she had outdone the others. Her calendar was elaborately carved into one of the marble pillars that supported the atrium of her house in Rome, directly between two shrines to the ancestral gods. Not something you could simply slap a fresco over when the technology became outdated. That was as it should be. Caesar had boasted that he had the power to parcel out time until the end of history, and the least his niece could do was invest a little money in showing she believed him.

All the more so because it wasn’t true. The year before that one had lasted for 445 days, in spite of anything the calendar said. More and more now, the seasons were slipping from their appointed months, the lucky and unlucky days getting mixed up with each other, until no one could be sure which was which. Caesar’s calendar was simply an exercise in believing otherwise. In trusting that Rome was supreme and unchanging, that the barbarians wouldn’t beat down the gates, that the relentless erosion of the good old days could be stopped. That time could be captured in stone.

Ursus, whenever he passed through the atrium, liked to study the twelve neat columns of days, each one marked with a letter to show its character—propitious or ill-omened, a market day or a day for an assembly, a god’s day or a day of penance or something in between. Those, the in-between days, were the most interesting. The days on which anything at all could happen. The ides of March, when this story begins, was one.

Imperial Roman calendar. Calendar history is way too much fun for nerds like me. See cool websites on the Roman calendar here, and the history of the Western calendar here.

Licking it into Shape

A mother bear licks her cubs into shape

Today I revised a paragraph, over and over again. It became two. It became five. It melted back down to one. And now I think I’ve finally got it right. But perhaps tomorrow I’ll look at it, be horrified, and start all over again.

This only took me five hours or so.

Nevertheless, I’m fairly sure I’m on the right track. One of the right tracks. There are many.

Yesterday I tried a different path. I sat down and wrote 1500 words on a new project. The story moved forward. A character came into focus, one I’ve always wanted to meet. And vivid images: a garden with walls so high they shut out the sun, girls playing with a shuttlecock. A knight dropping out of the sky.

Yesterday was better than today, but today was, I think, more necessary.

Momma bear and cub, medieval version

For me, composition feels (almost) easy. Writer’s block? On the contrary, I spew words. Then I look back and discover those words are terrible. The remaining 99% of my time is spent revising.

The problem isn’t that I’m deaf to the cadence of sentences, or that I fail to find the precise detail that brings an image to life, though these things are hard, too. It’s that stories have shape. While I’m entranced with the girls and their shuttlecock, wondering who weaves the coarse linen fabric of their dresses and what they will have for dinner that night, the story is running on without me in another direction. I’ve written a page that’s part of something else. Or, very likely, part of nothing at all.

At which point, it’s time to throw (almost) everything away.

Looks more like she's eating it. But then, I do sometimes have to eat my words.

My favorite description of the revision process comes from Suetonius’ Life of Virgil. It explains how Virgil wrote the Georgics by composing many verses every morning, then throwing away all but a few of them in the afternoon. In this way, “he fashioned his poem after the manner of a she-bear, and gradually licked it into shape.” (See here for an English translation of Suetonius' Life of Virgil, and here for a blog post about this lovely passage.)

  

The image is based on the ancient and medieval belief that bear cubs are born as shapeless blobs of flesh. It's up to their mothers to give them form, which they do by licking them. (For the medieval bestiary tradition, see here.)

This makes wonderful sense to me, but that doesn’t mean I know how to do it. What to keep and what to throw away? Will the book I'm shaping turn out to be a bear or a monster?

For now, the plan is just to keep on licking.

"De urso" ("About the bear")