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")