Known Unknowns #1: The Hall of Dinosaurs

When my older son was two (he’s now twelve), he was a dinosaur fanatic. Which was unusual, as Eli was never really a toy guy. Cardboard boxes and shoes? Sure. Plastic toys? Not so much. So when he began showing a lasting interest in dinosaurs, the people in his life began, slowly, to give him toy dinosaurs. Soon he had bins full of them, as well as posters and books. Every night we read How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight, which is slightly about dinosaurs, but mainly about not being a bastard at bedtime. (Please note that this is not a complaint.)

I should mention that we lived in New York City at the time. Which means at some point I decided it would be a great idea to bring my young dinosaur fan to the Museum of Natural History. We went on a rainy fall afternoon, a Sunday, taking three subways to get to the Upper West Side of Manhattan from our apartment in central Brooklyn. Eli chattered the whole way about seeing the dinosaurs. He held his plastic stegosaurus in his hand and made deep growling noises at it. When we got to the museum and paid our admission, he told the guard, “I’m going to see the dinosaurs!” I asked him if he wanted to see the dinosaur room now, or if he wanted to see other things and use the dinosaurs as a Big Finish to the visit. He looked at me as if to say, “Are you fucking crazy, old man?” Up we went to the fourth floor.

As we rounded the corner and approached the Hall of Dinosaurs, Eli suddenly let go of my hand and ran toward the Hall. I braced myself to run after him — on the streets and in stores, he could be a terrifying sprinter — but then he stopped just outside the massive doorway of the Dinosaur Hall. He just froze — I was still behind him — and I could see his head tilt upward, taking in the triceratops that sat in the middle of the room*, larger than our car, and then the T-rex skeleton that seemed to fill the entire top half of the massive hall. It was sweet and sublime, being witness to this small boy’s first encounter with prehistoric wonder. And then he turned around and I saw that his face was filled with tears and snot. I ran to him, and Eli began pounding on my legs in an insane fury. “What’s wrong, buddy?” I said as I shielded myself from his crazy little fists.

He took a deep, shuddery breath and howled, “You didn’t tell me they were gonna be dead!”

I’ve taught enough workshops now to recognize that moment when someone who wants to write is frozen in front of the dinosaur hall that contains the act of writing as it actually is. It’s usually when the rest of us are discussing that person’s piece and I say something benign, like, “When you rewrite this, try doing it from X’s perspective.” The student goes pale, and their mouth forms a thing that’s half-smile, half-grimace. “Rewrite it? Really? Like, the whole thing?”

Oh, yes.

This is a concept that took me a long time. In fact, I didn’t get it until a couple of years after that incident with Eli and the big, long-dead fossils. I was well into grad school — let’s say halfway through — when I first and finally submitted to the pleasures (and necessities) of breaking a thing to fix it. Until then, I’d always assumed two things: One, that I might be a secret genius merely in need of discovery; and two, that giving up on an idea, or a way of presenting an idea, was cowardice. Did I say two things? Three: that giving up on an idea or a way of doing things was terrible and would break it, and me, forever and ever. I see this a lot in students: There’s a terror that comes with rewriting, which is a word and concept I hold distinct from revision. And I know exactly what they’re feeling: If I rewrite this, the brain thinks, all that’s good about it will be gone and I’ll have to admit to myself and others that I didn’t really know what I was doing in the first place.

In my own experience, the sooner you learn this last part, the sooner you become a better writer. Because you don’t know what you’re doing, hardly ever. And best of all, we’re no longer chiseling characters into granite tablets. You can rewrite a thing and if it doesn’t work, you can try it again without too much damage to your hands and lungs. And you can always go back to the thing you did before.

Writing, for me — by “writing” I mean all of it: first draft, full rewrites, nitpicky word-choice fixes — now seems to me less an act of carefully constructing a thing than it is of building something, then repeatedly breaking it to make the thing I really meant to make but didn’t even know was the thing when I started. Maybe writing is a lot like paleontology, where you have to figure out what the hell the bone in your sifting box goes to, and how it fits with the other bones you have. Paleontology is a field which not long ago was equal parts serious scientists and circus owners; the circus owners are gone now, but the field itself seems to constantly be shifting, updating its story. And while such a statement might make a creationist happy, I believe it’s a good thing. The main thing is, there’s a story there at all. So the key must be having the willingness to accept a new answer, to see things a different way than you’ve been seeing them. Commit to the work, then, the process, but be willing to abandon the ideas when all the evidence is adding up a different way. I can get with that.

I am by no means cured. A funny thing about writing is that I find I have to not only trick myself again and again in order to produce certain results (I’ll get into some of these tricks in future posts), but I also have a kind of amnesia when it comes to remembering, Oh, yes, this is how it works. I’m forever a two-year-old, locked in horror and grief at the front entry to the dinosaur hall.

* I may have the layout of the Hall wrong, but that’s how I remember it. Memoir!