Mining for Language

What use can be wrung from the oldest stories collecting digital dust in your hard drive? I have called them "White Whales" because, well, they are an obsession. But I’m not trying to hunt them across the sea and kill them. The metaphor is imprecise. These old stories are those I wrote three or more years ago. I didn’t know what I was doing, I just wrote them. Tackier stories have been written. Stupider stories have been written. But these old stories are awfully tacky and generally stupid: embarrassingly so.

But: they contain weird, interesting stuff. Rough images. Raw voices full of grit and dandruff. Narratives bent at odd angles like girders before a collapse. These are fucked-up pieces of artifice, as gangly and awkward as teenagers. And now, a few years distant, I can see what you were struggling so hard to do back then. You were putting in quite an effort. You had something to prove. Your story, it made no sense. But, wow! Do you see what you did without even knowing it? In those days writing a story was a pursuit, a chase. Words added up to pages and pages of this which was not a story, but something better: a story mine.

A mine, as in "coal mine" or "uranium mine" or "gold mine" or whichever mineral you wish to extract from the narrative earth. Bizarre images jump out among the striated patterns. From another, more recent story, I extracted one entirely new story from a single paragraph of about two-hundred words. That is what I mean by a mine. Much the same way that I read with a pen—–writing down unusual sentences, noting images that catch my attention, reminding myself to look up an unfamiliar word later—–when reading a book, I extract the useful and the strange from my own narratives, things I never noticed before.

Do we all have story mines? I’ve heard that Tobias Wolff throws away every rough draft. Why would he do that? I’ll probably spend the rest of my life dragging around binders of notes and papers wherever I go. Words are up for grabs. I must find them and write them down.