A Different Kind of WIP...
A Story Sans Intro
For the Birds
The End.
With seven keystrokes (and one tap on the spacebar), he’s accomplished something he’d always dreamed he would do. Despite dozens of former failed attempts, Brewster Harwich has finally done it; he’s finished writing a book. Well, only the first draft of a book—but he’d never gotten even that far before. He leans back in his chair and gazes serenely at the words on his laptop’s white screen. He sits up, reaches forward, and hits the delete key—removing the period after “End.”
The offending punctuation mark seems too abrupt, too final, and he doesn’t want the moment to pass so quickly. “The end” he thinks, “is not a sentence.” Certainly not a sentence in the judicial sense. They are his words and they should behave the way he wants them to behave. Besides, he knows that his work on the book has only begun. This was not the time for periods. He switches off the computer and slides away from the desk.
He has an errand to run.
He drives into town, headed for the big box office supply store. He drops two reams of three-hole-punched copy paper in his cart. They are followed by a black four-inch-thick ring binder, a couple of red fine-tipped felt pens, two black ink cartridges for his printer, and a package of sticky yellow Post-it notes.
There is a lot of editing that needs doing.
He carries all his purchases home and loads the printer with pre-punched paper. Over the next few hours, he prints the entire book, stopping every few minutes to refill the printer and check the print quality (just in case the ink cartridge needed replacing). It takes a long time because his book, For the Birds, fills 937 double-spaced, single-sided pages. Every time he refills the paper, he removes the printed pages and slides them onto the rings of the big black binder.
For the Birds will, in all likelihood, be his only book. He can’t imagine starting another project of that size—and, besides, did he know enough about anything else to write another book? Birds have been his life. He made every effort to make the non-fiction work as complete as possible. Every entry has common and scientific names, summer and winter ranges, courting and nesting habits, preferred foods, risks of predation, and so on.
And so on.
It is to be his magnum opus—and, no doubt, his only opus. It has to be right. He pours himself a cup of coffee, sits at his desk, peels the cellophane off a block of Post-it notes, uncaps a red pen, and flips open the binder.
On the first page, he discovers three typos, a mis-spelled word, and “the” typed twice in quick succession. He marks the corrections and adds a Post-it as a reminder tab. Editing, he fears, is going to be a much bigger job than writing had been.
Over the next few weeks, he carries the binder (and assorted accessories), in a canvas shoulder bag, everywhere he goes. In luncheonettes and coffee shops, on trains and buses, even in doctors’ waiting rooms, he plods along with his editing task. Before he reaches a third of the way through the manuscript, he runs out of Post-its. “Idiot,” he thinks, “I don’t need a whole Post-it, just to mark a page!” He peels off the used stickies, cuts them lengthwise into quarter-inch strips, and reapplies them to the offending pages. It is a small, but prudently economical act.
By the time he reaches page 523, he notices something he’d missed. The tense of his writing arbitrarily bounces between “present” and “past.” Not good. He decides the writing would be more energetic if written in the present tense. He flips back to page one and begins rewriting every sentence that uses the past tense.
A month later, the pages of the binder bristle with so many slivered Post-its that it resembles a shaggy yellow beast emerging from a black vinyl den. He begins the tedious process of transferring each of the red-marked passages into a copy (saved as “v.2”) of the original file on his laptop. He expects this to be a routine—almost mechanical—process, but is surprised to find that, as he goes along, better ways of expressing his ideas often reveal themselves.
For example, he reads a passage about the ethereal song of the Wood Thrush—flute-like notes that float, disembodied, through twilight hardwood forests, in a way that makes a listener uncertain, moments later, that he’d even heard it. The passage was too evocative to be no more than a bullet point in the entry for Hylocichla mustelina. He considers adding a chapter, just on bird song, and removing those parts of the individual entries. It would change the structure of the book and add a lot more work. He has already spent a few years of his life on the current project and is reluctant to add more. On the other hand, it might make a lovely companion volume to For the Birds—if he was up to the task (which was hardly certain, considering the muddle in which he's found himself). He decides to leave it, as is, for now.
A few more weeks go by, and the last of the Post-its have drifted, like spent flower petals, onto the floor around Brewster’s desk. He starts looking for possible publishers for his book. He has high hopes, but holds no illusions about his prospects. The first few queries, with sample chapters, lead to no response at all. Finally, a letter arrives from a publisher in New York.
It reads, “Thank you for thinking of us, but your book is not a good match for us. Please keep us in mind if you have any other books in progress—and we wish you well in finding a suitable home for For the Birds.”
Over the next few months, Brewster collects seven or eight similarly-worded rejections. He begins to wonder how people who—ostensibly—work in a business that puts a premium on good use of language, could all resort to the same few hackneyed expressions.
Eventually, he receives better news.
A Boston publisher is interested in For the Birds. They tell him to expect to hear, shortly, about an offer from their financial department, and that he will be contacted by an editor assigned to the project. Brewster doesn’t think his book needs editing, after all the work he’s already put into the book—but perhaps a little tweaking to make the book more consistent with the house style might be in order.
How naïve.
Russell Clarke, his new editor, writes, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” but Brewster doesn’t recognize the famous words Emerson wrote to Whitman about Leaves of Grass. Any editor—who very likely has an MA, or more, in Literature—might assume that any author, having a similar education, would recognize it. Brewster, however, had been a biology major in school; he has no idea who Emerson and Whitman were.
Still, he likes the sound of it.
Clarke’s letter goes on, confirming Brewster’s worries about a lot more work on the book—a book he thought he had finished. Clarke writes, “I love the level of detail in For the Birds. You have collected a vast amount of technical data, yet made it accessible to non-professional readers. As you might suppose, having plenty of non-professional readers is what publishers want (how many books, after all, could we expect to sell to ornithologists, alone?). Which brings me to my other thought.”
Brewster winces at the prospect.
Clarke continues, “In reading your impressive manuscript, I was struck by the fact that you seem to have written in two very different voices. The factual, no-nonsense voice that is appropriate for a non-fiction work of this sort was to be expected. However, several times in the text, you switched to a more poetic voice, a voice directed right at the reader, a voice intended to share your love of the subject, almost like an actor who turns away from the stage and speaks right to the audience. It shocks and delights. I love hearing that voice.”
Brewster senses the approach of bad news, couched as it is in a gush of compliments.
Clarke goes on, “I think it’s a mistake to market your book as non-fiction. You should seriously consider making it a novel.”
Brewster’s premonition was as he expected—but not at all what he expected.
Clarke continues, “Imagine that there is a writer who thinks like you, and has both a poetic and scientific nature. Imagine that your book is about that writer, who is struggling to write a book very like For the Birds. Your book, almost exactly as it is, could be a book-within-a-book—but the larger book would really be about an appealing, but long-suffering, author as he tries to suppress his more romantic side. You get to keep all of your lovely insights—and, at the same time, publish a book that is destined to have bigger sales and, with some judicious efforts on our part, even have a chance at a movie deal. What do you say?”
Brewster says nothing. He has fainted.
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