The elephant in the butterfly net: a fable

From Born Expecting the Pleistocene:

Suppose there was an elephant who somehow managed to get a butterfly net stuck across the front part of the top of his head. Suppose further that the elephant knew that the purpose of a butterfly net was for capturing butterflies. Suspend your disbelief a bit further and suppose that the elephant thought that because it was caught in the net, it was, like a butterfly, trapped, and had no recourse but to submit to the demands of the person holding the other end of the net. And suppose that, tragically, there was in fact no one on the other end of the net.

You are walking through the jungle and happen upon this elephant, which is by this time well on the way to starvation because, being trapped in the net, it has not been able to move from the spot for several days. What would you do to try to save the elephant? Feed the elephant by hand so that it doesn’t die? Inform the elephant that there is no one holding the other end of the net? Attempt to convince the elephant that it is not a butterfly, and thus not subject to the rules of butterfly nets, that a butterfly net is powerless against its massive bulk? It seems the simplest solution might be just to remove the net.

There is one other possibility, however. Since the elephant is already convinced it is helpless and at the mercy of its captor, you might simply grab hold of the other end of the net yourself and start issuing commands.

Brief reflections on the writing process

For me, writing as an art form is very much analogous to sculpture. Generally speaking, there are two main (and not mutually exclusive) methods employed when “sculpting” a written piece: build-up and chip-away. During build-up, I begin with a general idea and then, to the degree possible, I let the structure evolve organically as words and sentences are added (although I do a fair amount of mid-sentence editing along the way). During chip-away, I take what I have already written and then bend it, balance it, shape it into a clearer, crisper form—here the added texture and fine detail change what I have written from a blankly stated idea to a meaningful expression: a reflection of a small part of my mental and emotional topography as it relates to the subject at hand. Word choice is a major focus during the chip-away phase, but crafting the right syntax is equally—if not more—important. Syntax can add subtle shades of meaning, giving a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, or a whole section a flavor that mere words cannot carry.

I enjoy both parts of the process, but the chip-away phase leads to the most satisfying experience of “flow.”

What I lack is a more general top-down organizational schematic that could somehow serve to regulate and coordinate the direction of these two phases of the process. This is intentional on my part: having such top-down control interferes with the creative impulse. But because of this, I will occasionally write myself into a corner where I am forced to make a painful choice. In terms of the sculpture metaphor, imagine that you have sculpted a highly textured and most beautifully detailed wing, where each feather is perfectly placed and folds seamlessly in with its neighbor, but then you discover that the overall form is not that of a bird after all, and that from the beginning you have really been sculpting a horse. At this point it becomes very tempting to keep the wing and change directions completely, to abandon the terrestrial horse you started with and go with a Pegasus instead. I have found that the best solution in these cases is to put the wing in a box to be taken out sometime in the future when I know that I have a more avian goal.

Although, truth be known, it can sometimes be very hard to let go, and I have amassed a sizeable collection of hideous and unpublishable chimeras over the years.