Pruning the Vines
“You better come learn how to do this in case I drop over dead.”
This is Dad’s way of guilt tripping me into learning how to prune his humble vineyard right alongside him. I didn’t need the guilt trip; I was curious anyway. For the past three years, my dad has been attempting to establish his own vineyard in the same fields in which he grew Christmas trees during my childhood. When he began, he knew absolutely nothing about wine, let along producing it. But that is my dad—he runs headlong into projects, devotes 100% of his energy, and will be damned if he lets anything stop him. So the entire family has no choice but to learn the grape trade right along with him.
On the day that he had requisitioned my company, I was admittedly sidetracked by the other projects I had already lined up. It was a rare warm, sunny Saturday in January. I wanted to write. I wanted to ride my bike. I desperately needed to clean my house. I wanted to do absolutely nothing except sit with the sunshine on my face. However, a new skill directly resulting in the production of alcohol can be just as tempting, so I pulled on some clothes and trotted out to the fields.
My dad has been working with a consultant from an area winery who has helped him establish his vines and curate quality growth. I was there to take mental notes, watch the technique, and ask questions. It didn’t take long until it became apparent that vine pruning is directly akin to editing. I was delighted—in the most nerdy of ways! The purpose is the same. The approach is the same. The reluctance is the same. The results are the same. I quickly took away three rules from the consultant that I knew I had to bring back to my own revision process:
“The vines with the least amount of buds are going to get more growth.”
It’s important to note that our purpose that day was to strip down the runner vines to an essential length and remove what I would call the “suckers”—those off-shoots that deprive the main vine from nutrients. One might think the buds seem promising. They are proof that a woody tendril will actually produce the fruit that you have waited so long to harvest. The consultant told us that despite our natural tendency to dote on the buds, we must methodically thin them in order for the vine to grow to its full potential. This early in the game, the vine needs to grow, not the sweet buds. In writing, this is similar to a desire to dote on our perceived moments of genius (yes, this is a self-ascribed description). How many times have I desperately wanted to hang on to beautiful line or description or even a favorite character because of its potential for growth, because it hinted early that there would be a beautiful literary bounty to be harvested later? While these may be examples of well-crafted syntax or almost tangible imagery, often the only purpose they are serving is to slow the pace, sideline a reader, or detract from the real message of the work. They are suckers and I am sucker for loving them so much.
“Before you cut the vines, take the fruit off.”
This is not to say one should cut willy-nilly. Beauty and progress is worth saving. Sometimes what you have is a fully developed piece. It should be harvested. But that doesn’t mean you are done. Your vine has more to yield and that small, yet tasty, fruit can be used in a fine field blend of extracted parts. For each major work, I create an electronic file of the shavings. When I need inspiration or direction or sometimes just amusement, I return to this file. Often I find that these scraps were just ahead of their time. They weren’t quite right for my vine—my novel or short story, at the time. They needed to find the right vessel and that vessel may not arrive until the next year. Approaching a significant manuscript like a novel could mean outlining the entire plot before even one literary line is crafted. However, I have also written an entire novel beginning with one scrap of journal entry paper from one five-minute writing warm-up assignment I gave myself. When I wrote it, I loved it. But it was not the right time to use it. I had to rediscover it much later in that file of shavings.
“When you have a jumbled mess, start with what you know you ain’t gonna use instead of what you want to keep.”
This was my favorite piece of advice. Pruning back vines can be a bit intimidating. They crisscross and jump lines and entangle themselves for survival. Knowing which ones to keep and which ones to cut is nothing short of precise surgery. Cut the wrong vine and you’ve lost a whole year’s growth. As my father and I stood staring, sheers in hand, at an especially complex vine, the consultant smiled and went to work. He explained that it is sometimes best to simply get rid of what you know you shouldn’t keep. So for our writing, we should cut those extra words that trip our tongues. We should remove the scene we don’t really need. We must simplify the dialog. If we spend a long time with our own work, which most of us do, we start to doubt the integrity of every single word. Maybe nothing I have written is worth keeping! We might wonder what the heart of the piece is and what should be highlighted. By focusing on chipping away the superfluous, we ultimately reveal the art. Much like Michelangelo released his forms from marble instead of embedding them in the marble, we must release the message, the vine from the entanglement of convolution. Sometimes the message or even the image is simple. Sometimes it can arrive in a simple sentence with simple words. As James Baldwin said, “You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.” Or, in this case, as straight as a vine.