What My Rough Draft Has Taught Me
I will be twenty-nine in a few months. It is an important milestone – the last of my twenties – but it also spells the winding down of the rough draft of the work that dominated my entire youth. I am speaking about my novel, Canis Major, which I have been working on and off in its current form since October 2015.
In that time, I have started a graduate program, studied some languages, and worked to educate myself in all ways. But the greatest piece of education I have received came from the novel itself, a trial that has befuddled, thrilled, frightened, and then raised me. Canis Major and I had a lot of late night conversations, our feet curled beneath us as we sat opposite each other on the sofa, and chats over tea in coffee shops. The book reminded me of what it means to be alive, not simply possess a heartbeat, but a reason to go on having that heartbeat. For ten years, I was trapped in a forest. When I finally stumbled out, bloodied and numb from the effort of going on as feral branches scooped at me from above, I emerged into florescent lights and a flimsy pen. I made it back, and I started to write again.
Canis Major is something of a cannibal. It consumed a large number of independent short stories that were integrated into its twin plots of the adventures of Alexander and Cuyamungué. It has been influenced by everything from Omar Khayyam to Louise Glück to The Journey to the West. As a fantasy, one could describe it as a portal story, but there is no magic or classical adventure that Alexander and his fellows experience. I have the lofty goal of marrying it with the liminal fantasy, something subtle and grand at the same time. Alexander’s plot concerns the falling out surrounding a horrible event. Cuyamungué’s is a quest to meet and join the great love of her life.
I have crafted outlines, filled a box full of notes on characters and stories, and I have now gotten to the point where it will be any day until I complete the rough draft. Breaking new ground with sentences is difficult for someone like me, someone whose mind is generally frozen ice. But we are getting closer, and that moment when I put the final period on the final sentence of the draft will inevitably be the greatest of my life so far. My soul will be in tune with the ink on the page. My heart will sing its beats like it were a songbird.
From Canis Major I also learned that giving up and condemning oneself to death is not an option. The most difficult chapters to write, “Into the Clouds” and “Evelyn, Ectali, and the Garden of Etalcuayoli,” have been the equivalent of hiking up a steep hill as the rocks and loose dirt below my feet humbly and viciously give way and I stumble. Through these chapters, I fall, I scrape my knees and my palms, and I wind up with twigs matted in my hair. Then I stand up. Because I cannot go back to my forest, cannot go back to being unable to see the sun and the moon through the dense canopy of wild, willful trees.
When I stood back up with my torn jeans and hole ripped in my shoe, I realized that I was a lot stronger than I had ever believed. In honesty, I sometimes wallow in self-pity. Yet that day that I picked myself back up, remembering Samuel Becket’s words – I cannot go on. I’ll go on. – and I straightened my posture. I will go on. And I stepped forward. I placed my foot on the dirt, and I climbed up, sometimes waving my arms about me to regain my balance.
And Canis Major taught me to laugh, even when my jokes fall flat. I learned to feel something. I learned to dream. To watch the sky for clues. To tend to my flowers and plants. To appreciate decorating for the holidays. To buy scented candles all year round. To eat spaghetti. To annotate my books. To love Gregorian chant.
I will miss what Canis Major was in this stage, but I will always have these memories of its youth and mine. Perhaps this is what it is like to raise a child. If that is the case, then I will employ some parental cliches and say that I was so happy to see it come together and what it will be when the final word of the final draft is placed with my own pen.
