Damn it, Jim. I’m a Writer, not a Paleontologist

by K.A. Nuzum 

Not so fast, Bones.  The more fictional tales I write, and the more time I spend in the process of writing them, the more whole-heartedly I embrace Stephen King’s characterization of story in his book, On Writing.  Says King, “Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world.  The writer’s job is to…get as much of each one out of the ground as intact as possible.” (OW 164)

Often as writers we are advised to chop and hack and delete a good share of what shows up in our messy first drafts, and it is a painful, ugly process.  But, if it is actually excavation we are about, as King suggests, it behooves us to lay down the machetes—at least temporarily—and take up picks and brushes.  If bone diggers we be, we must consider that much of the initial “stuff” we find littering the surface of our writing may actually be the fingers and toes of the tale we strive to tell.

The novel I am currently at work on, Catrina’s Foot, has proved to me that King is right about the nature of the task we undertake.  Within the first forty pages of drafting I was nearing the climax. I had unearthed a fossil skeleton’s skull at one end and several tail vertebrae at its other end…but nothing in between. By page forty some of the characters had barely introduced themselves; some had not yet even had time to pull on their boots before they were all hustled off to the cemetery, the location for the climax scene.  However, I was absolutely certain that page forty really was the true, the right, the brave ending of the novel. So, I followed King’s advice and got to digging.

I began the excavation with a close re-reading of those first forty pages. Initially, I panicked. There was a lot that didn’t make any sense, that didn’t seem to be a part of the skeleton I hoped to reveal.  There was a plethora of bones, but a scarcity of joints to connect them to.  So I contemplated throwing out all that appeared disjointed, but if I did that, instead of gathering in the cemetery on page forty, everybody would be there by page twenty-two!  I dismissed that awful possibility.  Instead, I vowed, I would have faith that the femurs, the ribs, the metatarsals scattered about on the surface of the story really did belong to the body of a creature that remained mostly hidden from my view. I just had to keep digging.

But where?  It made sense to poke about in the vicinity of what I could already see.  The story opens in northern New Mexico in 1918 on the Day of the Dead.  The main characters are a brother and a sister, Miguel and Catrina.  From page one it was clear that the brother was a sadist, particularly where his sister was concerned.  Throughout their shared childhood he had done awful things to her.  Things like cutting off the first joint of her little finger, forcing her to stick her arm down into a pit full of semi-hibernating snakes, knocking her into a raging river so that she almost drowned.  All of the scenes detailing Miguel’s cruelty were present in my first draft. I had discovered that bone but, I did not have a clue as to what motivated Miguel, why he was so terrible to his sister. I had nothing to connect it to. 

I found that first joint, as it were, when I examined the draft’s dialogue.  Each time Miguel did something awful to his sister, he would say the same thing: “Give me back my name, Catrina, and I will help you.”  The bone that was Miguel’s demand to return his name slid smoothly into the ball joint of his sadism. 

Again poking through the narrative, I now saw even more bones protruding from the ground: Catrina not only tolerated Miguel’s abuse, but made excuses for it.  She believed she really had been responsible for his losing his name.  These hidden hints began to make up the spinal column of my story: the circumstances which explained Miguel’s accusation of identity theft and Catrina’s sense of guilt. 

But there was more digging to do.

In the scene where Miguel knocks Catrina into the river, I found a strange little snatch of dialogue uttered by Miguel: “Your face is cut, sister.  Perhaps your name will be changed to Miguel’s Foot.  But no, the mark on your face is different than mine.  Yours will disappear and be forgotten, Catrina.  True?”

Well, it took but a moment more of digging for me to discover that Miguel’s face was disfigured by a port-wine stain birthmark on one cheek. That definitely could’ve given him issues that might lead him to be such a terror. But what had that to do with his sister?  And why, oh why, did she feel guilty about the birthmark, as if she were responsible for it?

Eureka! There, before my eyes, perfectly preserved, lay the full backbone of the story: Miguel and Catrina were twins. The midwife who delivered them had believed the birthmark on Miguel’s face was the stamp of the devil and had lobbied for drowning the baby right away, but others recognized that, in fact, the birthmark was a perfect replica of his twin sister’s tiny foot. Miguel had lost his name the moment his sister had received hers, and he was known for the rest of his life as Catrina’s Foot. He was shunned and ridiculed and taunted by all of his people because of the birthmark that looked like his sister had stepped on his face before they were even born. It was all her fault. Central questions of motivation, and back-story, and conflict were answered for me.

If I hadn’t believed Stephen King’s words of wisdom before that moment, I surely did then. We writers are paleontologists. Our job description could read: “Write, revise, DIG IT, DIG IT.”  We should not be so hasty in tossing out the knuckles, the tibias, the worn incisors that protrude at awkward angles from the bedrock of our first drafts.  We should approach every detail, every snatch of conversation with little picks, soft brushes, and a LOT of respect, for it may very well be that we have unearthed a tiny but essential part of a rare, a brilliant, or a truly terrifying Tyrannosaurus Rex that all the world will want to see.

 

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