Mark Twain Came Unraveled Last Night

right before my very eyes

I do a couple of things here at Real Live Preacher. I post essays, stories, whatever you want to call them. I take these very seriously and put so much work into them that I'm embarrased to say how much. All my beloved essay children get put into my archive section. It's a great feeling to do that. It's like tucking a child into bed.

And then sometimes I just "talk" to you about what's happening in my life. Typical blogging, you might say.

Occasionally I talk about the writing process. To be accurate, I talk about my own writing process since that's the only thing I know. Chuck Sigars and I have had some conversations about this. Talking about your writing process is breaking the rules a little bit. It's like pulling the curtain back to see the man behind the wizard. It's like like a magician publishing his secrets.

A. Are people interested in how you did it, or do they just want the product?
B. Do you really want to spoil the magic?

In my case I don't know what you want, but this is my blog and I don't care about the magic. See, I think of you as roughly fifty people. ("I Think of You as Roughly Fifty People" was, by the way, the title of an essay I had in progress. I will have to trash it now that I've used the title in this piece. Damn!)

I don't know how many of YOU there are reading this. The salon blog stats suggest that there are a fair number of you. I don't know how you found this blog, what you expect or want, or really anything about you. For my own reasons, I like to think of you as friends that I can talk to if I want. When the book comes out, this feeling will be even more pronounced. I'll be grateful if anyone buys it, but I think of you as the people who have been on the journey with me. Know what I mean?

So anyway, yeah, I talk about writing here sometimes.

When I write an essay, I am looking for a few things. A killer idea hopefully hinted at with a tender and/or intriguing title. I'm looking for crystal clarity and obsessive organization. I don't want any fuzzy threads sticking out to distract our weak, modern attention spans.

And I want beauty. I want to use regular words - the same words you and I use every day - but arrange them in a way so that they sound beautiful. Beauty and clarity work against each another, so there's considerable work involved in finding a good balance.

I don't want much, right?

Yesterday I finished an essay called, "Mark Twain." I FINISHED IT. Do you understand what that means to someone like me? It means I read it until I could read it through without finding anything to change. It means I could put this obsession to bed. I was through. Rest time. Play time. Whatever. It was done. Every word and phrase and paragraph was where I wanted it.

Last night, just as I was thinking of publishing it, my central metaphor unraveled right before my eyes. It hurt so bad. I groaned so loudly that Jeanene thought I had hurt myself. Well I had, if you think about it.

Here's what happened:

I was using Mark Twain not as the famous author's name, but as the riverboat phrase from which he chose his pseudonymn. Twain (Samuel Clemens) chose his writing name from the phrase that riverboat pilots would shout out when sounding the depths of the river. "Mark one" was six feet. They would shout out, "Mark One, quarter one, half one, and then mark twain." Mark Twain meant safe water. Two fathoms.

Only I got my metaphor mixed up. I thought mark twain meant they had reached the midpoint of the sounding line. How the hell am I supposed to know these things?

So here's the section from my essay that now has a problem:

Once I too dreamed that I might know every word of the bible. I hoped to sail my ship across the surface of its troubled waters and know every bend and horseshoe bay. I wanted to drop a sounding line and call out its depth to my people.

“Mark one!”
“Mark two!”
“Mark three!”

But it was my own life that was measured and my own life that was known. The sounding cry came from heaven and it was “Mark twain.” I now have as many years behind as ahead and there is no end to this river. I have therefore taken my pipe and seated myself by the stove to have a smoke and consider these things.

Ouch. I loved it so much, too.

I pulled up a Mark Twain website looking for the exact riverman phrases and found, to my dismay, that twain meant two fathoms, not the middle of the line. Two, not divided in two. No one ever shouted, "Mark two." They shouted, "Mark twain."

Now the word twain can mean either. It means two or divided into two parts. So I could probably get away with this. Seriously, who would know? But it was that exact thought that led me to my next problem. Exactly! Who would know what the hell I am talking about? I began to ask myself some questions.

How many people know 19th century riverboat jargon? People know Mark Twain, but how many know how he got his name. This IS a rather obscure piece of information. Is it worthy of being your central metaphor? How many people will read this and never get past looking for a reference to Samuel Clemens?

Beauty and clarity at it again. I thought we had a cease fire, but the battle still rages.

I don't know. The whole metaphor was spoiled for me for some reason. I wasn't charmed anymore. The essay unraveled right in front of me. There's a lot that can be salvaged, and I might just go ahead with the mark twain metaphor anyway. That's what I'm leaning toward. Who cares, right? It's a blog. Just publish it and move on.

Yeah, that's probably what I'll do. But not until the weekend. I need to meditate on this twain problem. In writing, sometimes beauty is born of destruction. I need to see this through to the end.

rlp

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