The Work Behind the Words 004 - Premises, Drafts, and Finding the Point

How to be the Okayest writer in the world

Every good story, every significant piece, starts with a question. If we learn to ask and if we learn to work for answers, something grows up out of the dust and dirt : light.

The work behind the words is an uncovering, and from the soil and sweat comes life.

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A Parable

In an ancient wood there was a meadow and every day a storyteller would come and speak to a plot of soft soil in the swaying grasses. Her tale was long, and it was winding, and soon it carved a hole into the dirt beneath her feet.

At dawn, she would begin her story and each word would turn the soil, each sentence would press deeper. By dusk, she would return to her camp, stepping up and out of the hole like a first step on a flight of stairs.

Weeks and months of this speaking and digging passed, and she had, by her words, dug up so much dirt that she now stood waist deep in the dark cool earth.

Rumours of the story teller reached the town and they came to watch her as she spoke herself down to her chest, down to her head, and out of sight altogether.

Buried almost.

“How foolish !” the onlookers scoffed. “You have dug yourself into a hole !”

The storyteller smiled, and she pressed her last words down into the soil, almost like a seed. And then she climbed out, and began to fill the hole.

“Stories,” she said, “always dig down before they grow up.”

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I want you to become the okayest writer you know — not great, not even good, just okay. There’s a freedom in that, kinda like Steinbeck said, “..now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good..”

Same thing, but now you can be okay.

I think being okay is great.

I am an okay writer, not good, not great, nowhere near mastered — but sure as shootin’ that’s my goal. The thing that makes me okay, and not bad, is that I know who I am, I do not have to pretend, and I’m okay to write things that suck.

That’s the dirty little secret, actually.

All the greats sucked at one time or another, and they all wrote sucky, winding, long-winded stories before they ever wrote the ones that pierced our hearts with love and life. Steinbeck said that, I think :

Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can suck.¹

And in order to get good, you have to get the suck out — not like it’s some finite mineral reserve where, if you unearth enough suck, you find the gold of good.

No, no, no.

More like, every idea, every question, in its infancy lays deep beneath the earth, and to get at it, you need to make the mess of digging. You need to get your hands dirty, need to work your body and heart ragged. You need to look a bit like an idiot. And then ?

Well, if you work hard enough, you might just find the question and be able to plant the seed.

And that’s what this little essay is all about :

The question, the sucking, and the light.

Or, another way :

The Premise, the Drafts, and the Point of it all.

Or, How to be Okayest Writer in the World.