A Million Years with You (40 page)

A sidebar of this rule is that tiny events are almost never trite. They're also economical. I'm thinking of the elephant, Tonga, who blew a little air at the three-legged rat. If I'd blinked, I would have missed it, but it seemed to say something about Tonga's feelings for the rat, and it's as original as all hell because nothing like it has ever been mentioned elsewhere. For that I thank Tonga.

 

Rule Five says Never Be Coy. I would not, for instance, use
rather
before a verb, as in
I rather think it's bad to do that
, because I freaking well know it's bad to do that—the
rather
is arch and nauseating and a majority of my favorite readers would be incredulous if they saw it. Rule Five says Speak Up.

This doesn't mean I can't use hidden themes, though. I happen to love hidden themes—not that all readers detect them, but what can I do? There's something pedantic about a theme stated outright rather than sneaked in quietly. One theme in this book is the mention of Gaia as a personification of the natural world, for which I have a reverential, almost religious feeling. Here I say that outright, but in parts of this book it's veiled because a fact can be less compelling than a feeling. I've used the Gaia theme in other books too, but a blogger took exception. He didn't pick up on the hidden theme, and assumed from my mention of Gaia that I belonged to a cult.

Which brings me to a peripheral issue—how much should one fear one's readers? The answer, I think, is some but not much. Readers can be scary, but most of their issues come out of left field so you cannot foresee them. In a review of my book
The Old Way
, the anthropologist Mel Konner found fault because I neglected to say that Bushmen were “fully human.” I can't imagine what else they could be, which is why I didn't say so. As for the blogger, he might have found the Gaia theme unfamiliar, hence the misunderstanding, as some readers do better with well-processed, predigested themes. That doesn't mean a writer should use them, though. The blogger can fly at the moon. So can Mel, for that matter.

 

Of all the rules of writing by which I try to govern myself, Rule Six is the most important, and it's Revise, Revise, Revise. Revision is essential for writing, or it certainly is for most people, although I wonder about Proust. How long would it take just to handwrite 1.5 million words with a pencil, let alone revise them? But everyone else revises, or they should.

The most compelling advice about revision was told to me by a friend who had heard it from someone else, so I don't know who offered it. But it's this: Look at your manuscript, then find your best sentence and delete it. You won't want to do this, but until you can, your revisions will be struggles because you will twist and turn to save a good sentence. This will consume your time and create complications. So my rule is to revise and keep revising, tossing whatever doesn't fit, no matter how hard I worked to produce it or how good it looks. Revise draft after draft and then revise the galleys.

I revise all the time, even when away from my desk. Revisions erupt in my head especially when I'm driving. I keep a notebook and a pencil in the car and pull off the road to write them. Once the book is in print it's too late, and if you've missed something, you'll be sorry. Nothing is worse than opening a copy of your newly published book only to see something you wish you hadn't said. But sadly, this happens to me all too often. My finished manuscripts bear no resemblance to the early drafts, but even when I read the printed version I still want to make changes. A good way to avoid this (not that I always keep my own rules) is to set a finished manuscript aside for a few weeks, then reread it. That way, mistakes you have internalized will jump out at you and you can fix them.

The importance of revision cannot be overstated, but revision can be overdone. Often enough, after I've finished a section, I think of something else that could be in it, but sometimes the addition makes the section cumbersome so I try to be strong and not include it. But I can't always resist. For instance, I very much wanted to add a piece about my father's sense of humor and his proposed will. He said he planned to leave his money to a pilot who would fly his embalmed body in its coffin around and around the world, stopping in every country at every point of interest and sending postcards to all his friends and relatives saying “Wish you were here.” Dad had enough money to keep this going for years, but of course it was a joke and of course he didn't do it. I loved the idea, though, but couldn't find a good place for the story, so I put it here.

Sometimes I revise too much. I once wrote a very funny paragraph about some Namibian villagers who had been exposed by missionaries to the Bible story known as “The Woman in the Well.” In the story, Jesus sees a woman getting water from a well. He's never met her before, but somehow he knows she's been married several times and by then is living with a man to whom she isn't married, so he confronts her.

The villagers were shocked. Was Jesus a sorcerer, to have supernatural knowledge? And why was he so interested in the love life of a stranger? He was trying to score, the villagers decided. That was gall, even for a sorcerer.

Unexpected interpretations can be funny, and my account of the story was hilarious. Then I began to tweak it, then revised it completely, and ended up with a mess that was obviously meant to amuse but that my editor disdainfully crossed out, saying it wasn't at all funny. By then the better draft was gone and could not be resurrected, and I still anguish over it because I'm not exaggerating when I say how funny it was. I'd try it again here but it's one of those heartbreaking memories that one somehow can't revisit.

So I try to be careful. But even when I'm doing more good than harm, I still fuss for weeks over revisions. Should this comma be here? No. Take it out. Now it's worse. Put it back. The whole sentence is bad. Fix it. Get rid of those hyphens and dash marks and for God's sake check the spelling. Dang! There goes the spell and grammar check. The place where the Bushmen lived was Nyae Nyae. This stupid gadget wants to make it Nyae. If I could see that grammar check, I'd kick it.

 

Word use, sentence structure, punctuation, and revision are accomplished with the conscious mind doing its best to make the right decisions. But for forward motion, one needs the unconscious, and when I can activate mine, I'm in business. Once I get my head filled with good subject matter, I'm carried to the place I'm writing about, and get to live there every day from five-thirty in the morning until eight o'clock at night. It's heaven.

I've liked the settings of all the books I've written, but the place I liked best was the site of my caveman novels,
Reindeer Moon
and
The Animal Wife
. These take place 20,000 years ago on the Siberian tundra or steppe. Why there, and not somewhere more familiar? Because I loved the African savannah and the Baffin Island tundra. They're the same thing, more or less, except that the savannah is warmer.

The reason for this is that many plants and animals occur in clines. Some of these ran north from Africa to the edges of the glaciers, and thanks to Bergmann's law, which says that the more massive you are, the less surface you have to release heat from your body, many southern mammals such as elephants and lions had large-sized relatives adapted for the cold. I liked to think of the animals I'd seen on the savannah living on the steppe—mammoths and cave lions, for instance, to say nothing of cave hyenas, woolly rhinos, tarpans (the northern relative of zebras), and many others. The difference was mainly in the two-toed ungulates, because the deer family dominated the steppe and the antelope family dominated the savannah. Bears were the only animals important to my novels who had no African counterpart. But bears were in Siberia just as they are today, and they're also in the woods near my house and come up to raid my bird feeder—a different kind of bears, to be sure, but bears nevertheless. I liked to think of revisiting all the animals who so greatly enriched my life.

Some readers complained because my Paleolithic ecosystem included both lions and tigers and these cats don't coexist. And so they don't, or not today.
¹⁰
But they did during the Paleolithic, tigers ranging throughout Asia and cave lions ranging almost everywhere except Australia. There's no point in being striped like sunlight shining through the trees if you don't live in a forest, and no point in being the color of dry grass if you don't live on a plain, but since my novel had both ecosystems, I could include both kinds of big cat.

 

There aren't many ways to live by hunting and gathering, so the people in these novels were partly modeled on the Ju/wasi. What I learned from the Ju/wasi that helped me here was how it feels to be part of the natural world and why survival depends on keeping everyone together and cooperative.

But that isn't exactly culture, so the culture of my Paleolithic hunter-gatherers was drawn from my imagination, as were their tools and clothing. Except for their lodges, which are made with mammoth bones and tusks as were some real Paleolithic lodges, I didn't try to replicate an actual culture, because to do so was off the point. All that an archaeologist can find are the material leavings. What the Upper Paleolithic felt like is forgotten. So I thought if I could get the environment right, the life of the people would follow.

Where to put this? I thought that 50° north latitude by 50° east longitude would be easy to remember, but these coordinates were near Lake Baikal, which was too big for my story. So I made the lake smaller. The fictional people who lived on its shores called it Woman Lake after their goddess, the fictional Woman Ohun. But those people were peripheral to the story. The main characters lived about eighty miles northeast of the lake in a mammoth-bone lodge near the top of a terraced valley through which flowed the Char, a fictional river that rose in fictional mountains something like my Wapack Range but much higher and longer. In summer, those people camped by the Grass River, about two days' walk northwest of the Char, not in lodges but in grass shelters something like those of the Ju/wasi.

An important lineage of my fictional people comes from the Fire River, which flows west from Woman Lake. This lineage gave rise to shamans, the most important of whom was a woman named Sali. By the time my first novel begins, Sali has already died in childbirth, along with her baby, some said at the hands of her husband, since the child she bore wasn't his. But unlike most departed spirits, Sali didn't go to the Camps of the Dead, whose fires you see in the west while the sun is setting. Instead, she became a tigress and stayed among the living. The people would see her near their camps or following a river, sometimes as a woman carrying a baby, sometimes as a tigress with a cub in her mouth. Sali had a sister named Hama. Hama had two daughters, Lapwing and Yoi. Lapwing had two daughters, Yanan and Meri, and Yanan tells her story in
Reindeer Moon
.

At a book signing for
Reindeer Moon
, a woman in the audience asked if the novel was autobiographical. Excuse me? Yanan lived in a lodge made of mammoth bones and became a spirit who turned into a wolf, a mammoth, a cave lion, and a red deer. Does that sound autobiographical? However, since Yanan narrates the book, it's written in the first-person singular, which could have caused confusion, and the narrator's description of sex with a kinsman (not a close one) could be what raised the question.

Needless to say, in real life I never lived in a mammoth-bone lodge; nor can I shape-change into an animal, much as I might like to. I've never had sex with a kinsman either. But the question got me thinking. If the book wasn't autobiographical at first, it was by the time it was finished.

 

Or some of it was. For instance, after Yanan became a spirit, a shaman asked for her help in hunting reindeer. To do this she became a wolf, and in my imagination, I did too. The wind lifted my fur, and on the wind I caught the faint odor of an ungulate. I headed off in that direction, and on the way heard other wolves howling. I didn't want to meet them and I worried. It felt risky, to be a wolf alone on the land of wolves who didn't know me.

When Yanan became a mammoth, so did I. My nostrils filled with the scent of the elephant barns in Portland. I was a mammoth for a long time, and wanted to join a herd of other mammoths who at first didn't welcome me. But in time they did and I spent the winter with them.

And once, Yanan became a lioness, asked by the shaman to drive a pride of lions from a cave that the people wanted to occupy. So I became a lioness, but as it turned out, I didn't dare confront the pride. Two male spirits, also in lion form, came with me to help, but when they caught the scent of all the lionesses they changed their minds, evicted the resident male lion, killed some of the cubs, and took possession of the pride and also the cave. This wasn't what the shaman wanted. I didn't know quite what to do about that, but I knew the pride would see me as an intruder so I ran away.

 

Yanan never became a tiger, and neither did I. But I hope to in a third Paleolithic novel which I plan to start when this book is finished. It will be narrated by Yanan's younger sister, Meri.

The shape-changing will be different in this third novel. In
Reindeer Moon
, Yanan's spirit becomes an animal who wasn't there before. Yanan would find herself standing on four feet with pointed ears, a long tail, and a fur coat, but without a past. She would be like a dog, say, suddenly transforming into a person and finding himself on Main Street without an address or a Social Security number. He'd have to cope as best he could, which is what Yanan did.

But Meri will become a powerful shaman like her great-aunt Sali, and while she is in trance, her spirit will enter the bodies of animals. There, she will learn everything about them, from the taste of their last meal to their relationships with other animals, if any. Meri will visit the body of a certain tigress whose hunting grounds are next to those where Sali hunts when she is a tigress. Then in my mind I too will be that tigress, hunting red deer and trying not to trespass on Sali.