I feel as though I’ve been in the air for some time, like one of those lucky dreams where you get to fly. But the kind of flying my acrophobic imagination always conjures in dreams is far more akin to falling with style than anything else. Arms outstretched, you feel the pull of the earth almost as hard as the lift on your wings, and the inner-ear feeling of instability, gliding like a packed 747 that just lost both its engines.
I landed, Sully-esque, somewhere in Nevada and as the winds settled and the dust cleared I picked up what I had with me and got back to work. And for me, working is intrinsically linked with the legal pad. I’ve mentioned it before, but no number of blog posts or essays could ever truly express my dependency on and love for legal pads, integral in every stage of working from ideation and note taking, to outlining and revising, and every step and scribble in-between.
Like most universally ubiquitous items, the legal pad has several dubious legends and origin stories that surround its invention and proliferation. The most common origin and explanation that I could dig up though dated back to sometime in the 19th century and involved, unsurprisingly, lawyers. Lawyers, as it turns out, do a lot of writing and a lot of note taking. Back in the day, paper used to be pretty expensive, and so to cut costs lawyers would stitch together scraps of sorting and sub-standard papers to create an economical notepad, the first legal pad. As the years passed and industrialization grew, lawyers still had the need for cheap notepads, so paper mills would take scrap and sub-par paper, pulp it and dye it rather than beech it (to cover up any imperfections and discrepancies between multicolored scrap paper used) and bind it into a cost-effective notepad. One thing I could not nail down though was a definitive story as to why the chosen color of dye is traditionally yellow. The most sensical answer I came across was that it was probably just the cheapest. Canary Yellow, to be specific, making it the Canary in the idea mine (the worst sentence I’ve ever written).
This time around, the book I’m working on is a little more narratively complicated than the last, and because modern problems require modern solutions, I have had to transition my outlining process from predominantly physical to mostly digital. Though I am far from a Luddite (though I am all for smashing the means of production that threaten your livelihood), I’ve never been the most technologically adept, and so this transition was not without its difficulties .
For some background, the plan for this novel (tentatively titled Rho) is to tell a single story from two perspectives. This novel can be read cover-to-cover, beginning with one protagonist, Outis’ story and ending with the other protagonist, Cali’s; it can also be read vise-versa, beginning with Cali’s story and ending with Outis’. Both Outis’ Book I: Greek Tragedy and Cali’s Book II: Toothpaste Spackle contain ten chapters of equal length, spanning the same amount of chronological time; the novel can therefore be read chapter-by-chapter as well: Book I, Chapter 1, followed by Book II, Chapter 1, then back to Book I, Chapter 2, followed by Book II Chapter 2, and so on. Giving the reader a nuanced way to experience the characters and perspectives of these intertwining stories.
Because of this both bifurcated and chronologically divided structure, getting my outline organized and locked down prior to beginning writing was imperative. As with the previous process, I began with a rough outline, a general idea of both the story I wanted to tell and the way I wanted to tell it, along with a collection of notes and ideas and sections of text to be worked into the first draft. After fleshing out this outline more and using it to create a timeline of both characters’ stories and interactions, I printed all my notes and arranged these various scraps of text chronologically and placed them roughly where they would go in this rough outline then set about filling in the blanks and stringing together the connective tissue and sinew that would tie the bodies of these simultaneous stories together. I did all of this rough work on two legal pads with tape and glue and pen and ink.
The next step, to compile a fleshed-out outline from which I would be able to base the manuscript, necessitated my embrace of the digital. I was able to copy-paste, rearrange, and rework these sections of text until I arrived at two documents of roughly 30,000 words each, each divided into ten chapters. And this is where I am now, fine-tuning this polished outline into an extremely rough draft. Once I am done fiddling, I’ll be able to (time and temperament permitting) sit down once again and pound out a first draft. Then it’ll be much more editing and revising until, one fine day, I feel ready to query and begin the process anew. All beginning, as many things do, with the humble notebook, the indelible legal pad.
Editing Sober 