Two days a week, about 50 steps from my desk, sits another writer in another office finishing up another book. His name is Tom French.
We met years and years ago at a Bruce Springsteen concert, and we have been writing pals ever since. We share the same agent and a long friendship, but it is a coincidence that has us writing our books at the same time in the same place.The coincidence has created many collateral benefits, including opportunities to encourage each other to keep going, or to share the challenges and writing strategies of the day.
My book in progress happens to be about the glamour of grammar.
Tom's book is about life and death at an American zoo. When I describe it that way to people, they look a little puzzled as if that definition needed expansion or exemplification. I can read the question in their eyes, "What about life and death in an American zoo?" If they had this language available to them, they might say "Life and death in an American zoo" is a topic, not a story. Not a theme. "What is this story really about?"
A version of this story published in the St. Petersburg Times began with this billboard:
"Love. Sex. Power. Escape. Mistaken Identity. Obsession. Exile. Seduction. Conspiracy. Status. Grief and Loss. Extinction. A King Challenged. A Queen Unleashed. Eleven Elephants, Flying. It's All Happening At The Zoo."
That remarkable list contains elements of theme and some foreshadowing of narrative, but it still lacks a sharply focused statement about why this story is important. Here's how the
newspaper version began:
Eleven elephants. One plane. Hurtling together across the sky.
"The scene sounds like a dream conjured by Dali. And yet here it is, playing out high above the Atlantic.
"Inside the belly of a 747, 11 elephants are deep into a flight from South Africa to Florida. These are not circus elephants, accustomed to captivity. All are wild, plucked from game reserves in Swaziland. All are headed for zoos in San Diego and Tampa.
"The date is Aug. 21, 2003 -- a Thursday morning that stretches on and on. The elephants are confined in 11 metal crates inside the 747's cavernous hold. They have been sedated. They are woozy and not particularly hungry. A few snake their trunks toward a man who moves up and down the line, replenishing their water.
" 'Calm down,' says Mick Reilly, 32. 'It's not so bad.'
"Mick and his family run the game reserves in Swaziland, a small kingdom in the southern tip of Africa. Mick knows the elephants' names and personalities; they recognize his scent and his voice. Watching them now, he wonders what they are thinking. Surely they can hear the thrum of the jet engines, feel the vibrations under their feet. But what can they make of all this?
" 'You'll be fine,' he tells them.'There's lots of food where you're going.' "
So we have a story, and an amazing one at that. What a scene: 11 sedated elephants crated in the cargo hold of a plane being shipped from reserves in Africa to zoos in the United States. The elephants catch the familiar scent of a human character, Mick Reilly, who talks to them. But why?
"He is tired of the long and bitter debate over this flight -- the petitions and the lawsuits and denunciations from people who have never seen for themselves what was happening inside the game reserves. There simply was not enough room for all of the elephants anymore, not without having the trees destroyed, the parks devastated and other species threatened. The only options left were to move some elephants out of the parks or kill them.
"He has heard the protests insisting that for the elephants any fate would be preferable to a zoo. That it would be better for them to die free than live in captivity.
"Such logic makes Mick shake his head. All this talk of freedom, as if it were some pure and limitless river flowing through the wild, providing for every creature and allowing them all to live in harmony. On an overcrowded planet, where open land is disappearing and more species are slipping toward extinction every day, freedom is not so easily defined."
Suddenly it's not just the elephants who are soaring 30,000 feet above the Atlantic ocean –- without the benefit of Dumbo ears. Now the author is lifting up the audience from narrative scene to the level of ideas, a level that requires a grammar of meaning, which contains both abstract words such as freedom, harmony, and extinction, but also metaphors, similes, and analogies, such as freedom as a "limitless river flowing through the wild."
So what is Tom's book really about? It's right there in the ninth paragraph of chapter one, the question of whether it is better for animals to die than to live in captivity. That question is neither rhetorical nor philosophical. When overpopulation of elephants destroys habitat for themselves and other species, humans decide it is time to "cull" the herd. What do you do with the extra elephants? Move them within Africa to another reserve where the problem will only reoccur? Kill them? Ship them across the ocean in airplanes where they will live in zoos and be put on display for human education and entertainment?
After watching Tom French gain the altitude he needed to give his story thematic meaning, I began to wonder what my 50 chapters of "The Glamour of Grammar" were really about. In the end, those essays may not be about dictionaries, parts of speech, parallelism, syntax or the dozens of other tools and strategies of language. I have come to think that the book is about freedom and power and life in a democracy. For what good is freedom of expression if you lack the power to express yourself?
Try this exercise.
Take a draft of your work and share it with a friend. Ask the friend to write you a message about what your work is really about. Then ask you friend to answer that question in a single sentence and then in three words. You do the same. What do you think your work is really about? Now compare your answers and discuss the similarities and differences.
This advice and the essay imparting it are wonderful. Thank...
