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What Do An Author and a Butcher Have In Common?

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

The Cow, of course!  If that’s not immediately clear to you, perhaps it will be in a minute.  This is an analogy that helped me when I was in the writing stages of this book production project.  Naturally, in order to have something to send to a copyeditor and to farm out to a cover designer, you must have spent the hours, putting in your time, doing the writing.  That’s a hard and long slog, as well.

Throughout my world travels, I filled a dozen journals, mailing them home as I went.  This is one reason that I didn’t blog.  I wanted all the anecdotes in one source, and I’ve been journaling for years, so it was natural to me.  My first duty at home was to type things up and see what I had:  400 single-spaced pages of daily diary.  Not edited and honed enough for a book, of course.  It took a long, long time to massage things; especially to cut things, and I wound up going down several blind alleys in my attempts to make it all read smoothly.

Once, in frustration, I took a long walk, after realizing that I had dumbly categorized events into chapters….such as dangerous things; weird hostels; crazy transportation; etc. and that destroyed the flow of the timeline.  I needed to begin again! 

That’s when I got my Butcher Analogy.  Okay, the 400-page story was the cow.  I had created it by doing the traveling and writing it up.  It was a fine cow.  But, nobody buys the whole animal and cooks it for their family.  As an author, I must butcher my cow into small pieces that will fit into an oven and can be served up in a tasty dish for everyone.  I must carve the stories out of the whole, and throw away all the hide, gristle, bone, gut, and other inedible parts.  I needed to get in there and hack away at my cow until I had isolated the steaks and roasts and high quality meats that would sell in the marketplace.  That meant that the greater part of my beloved cow would be thrown away.  Sigh!  Butchering is also hard and muscular work but there’s no way around it because no one can possibly eat a whole cow.  One practical way to think of this is to figure out how much each page will cost to print.  That provides a fine incentive to selectively hack away at the original carcass and serve up only the tastiest morsels.