Here’s Mud In Your Eye

In the writing workshops I offer, I like to talk about mud. When I do, I often see a puzzled expression on the faces of participants, but there is a connection between mud and writing.

My workshops are for people who have an idea for a book, fiction or non-fiction, but who want some advice on beginning that project. I frequently ask workshop participants to list the barriers to writing that have discouraged them in the past. One of the most common responses is that the idea of writing a book feels overwhelming.

Part of what contributes to that feeling of being overwhelmed is the experience most of us have when we enter a bookstore. Even a cozy and welcoming bookstore like Wild Geese Bookshop in Franklin, with its rooms filled with books, can make aspiring writers feel inadequate and like imposters.

But here is the good news. The books on bookstore shelves are glossy, imposing, and intimidating, but none of those books began that way. Before a book is published, it might have gone through twenty to fifty to maybe a hundred revisions. If we could read the first versions or drafts of what eventually become books, we would realize that those books began as mud.

There is nothing bad about comparing a book’s first draft or version to mud. The “mud” is the germ or initial book idea, that which first captures a writer’s interest. Over the years, many people have shared that they’ve stumbled onto something and thought, “That would make a good book.”

Sadly, most of us, when we have that thought, go on to think, “But I’m not a writer.” A lot of good book ideas die at that point. Other people, however, take the next step and write down the book idea. They think, “The idea might be nothing more than mud, but it’s mud that intrigues me. I’m going to play around with the mud tomorrow and tomorrow’s tomorrow and see what develops.”

That’s when something magical can happen. As a person returns to that initial germ or idea, she might change a word or add a sentence or paragraph. For who is a writer but someone who plays with muddy ideas and enjoys seeing the mud slowly become something like art as it is reworked and shaped?

Of course, writing isn’t everyone’s preferred form of expression, but the same process of mud becoming art is behind every song that we like and behind every piece of art that ends up in a museum.

A book, then, is mud that has been reworked until it becomes art. The books we find on bookstore shelves are the end result of a long process that began with a germ of an idea.

Who better to quote about this long process than Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, which many critics consider the greatest American novel. Even when Moby Dick was published a year and a half after he began writing, Melville still called it a “draft.” In fact, he called it “a draft of a draft.”

If you have a book idea that interests you, I recommend that you don’t throw the idea away. Instead, take a piece of paper and pen or open a blank page on your computer and start playing in the mud. You might be surprised at the fun you will have.