Writing BLUE HIGHWAYS: The Story of How a Book Happened

VII. A Piece of the Spectrum

83 VII. A Piece of the Spectrum Around Lucy, I’d taken to referring to the manuscript not as Blue Highways but as “a certain forthcoming book,” which more than amused us—it suggested an end to the work and the existence it demanded. The Tribune story let people in town know the proposed title, although I still had a list of twenty other possibilities; the silliest of them was (I cite this embarrassment only to encourage a young writer in the face of uncertainty to try almost anything) “The Wind Is Also a Rover.” Perhaps it was my hearing people say Blue Highways— or a couple of other things—that helped push it to the fore, despite Jack’s belief it wasn’t a good title; one day he spent an unsuccessful hour at lunch, leafing through pages of manuscript to find a phrase that could serve more evocatively. I rejected his opinion because, in anything , I prefer to be brought down not by someone else’s misjudgment, but by my own. (Only much later, having had time to consider the completed book and interpret 84 Writing Blue Highways it, would he recant his opinion, although defending it as his single error in editing the manuscript. He said, “Until the conclusion, I thought the book really was about your blue highways, but I see now those words are right. Maybe the only right ones.”) My pittance of earnings forced me to trim my own hair until, after a couple of months, it would become so misshapen I’d go in for a professional correction. Not long after the newspaper story appeared, it was time again to regain something like a humanly shaped head. When the barber finished—he whose chair I’d sat in for a dozen years, he who could never remember my name—said, “Good to see you, Blue!” And so I remained to him until his death a decade later. Maybe because I’ve had worse monikers, I was happy to let it stand, and his thin memory helped push the title forward. The color seemed to have the proper emotional cast. In June, I retired as court scribe. Lucy and I took a second road trip in Ghost Dancing, ostensibly in hopes of restorative mileage but also so I could confirm more details in the manuscript. There’s a hoary, unsettling quip among journalists: Check your facts, chuck your story. When we returned, settlements from our dissolutions allowed us to pool just enough money to qualify for a mortgage to buy a small house at the edge of town. I immediately began taking therapeutic breaks from writing by refurbishing the place; especially curative was sledgehammering out a line of two-by-four studs or a strip of concrete. The wish for frequent therapies and escapes may suggest—and with some accuracy—that I don’t really like to write, at least in the early stages; later, when a A Piece of the Spectrum 85 body of words exists to whittle on and a viable form has emerged and become more tolerable, it’s then I can enjoy tracking down hidden mischief in sentences, and riding a flow that so erases my sense of time I can become alarmed at how much life has passed while I’ve been seated. Good revising—despite what many manuals suggest —isn’t just reduction. Ernest Hemingway told a reporter , “The test of a book is how much good stuff you can throw away.” Maybe so, and maybe also another test might be how much good stuff still needs to be added to fulfill a book. Revision can profitably also be amplification , even expansion, and throwing out genuinely good stuff may indicate the original concept is too limited to fit the topic. The Grimms’ first book of fairy tales presented many of them as single colorless paragraphs without anything resembling a narrative, but the stories we recognize today are the result of as many as seven subsequent elaborations often tripling the length of a tale. Writers are not like sculptors in marble, but rather they are workers in clay or steel where exist techniques other than removal. Nevertheless, in later stages, lingering bugbears needing removal gain power because they can appear stubbornly intractable, “a worrisome thing that’ll leave you to sing the blues in the night.” (My momma done tol’ me.) After a year, I realized perhaps...