Metaphorical Stories

Metaphorical Stories

Refining Ore

8

James Dickey, when drawing an analogy between his writing process and refining ore, is actually describing a process of revision-as-reformulation: rather than focusing on the discovery of the “ore,” his material, he is concerned with attempts to transform that material into a more valuable commodity.

I work as a writer—let me see if I can come up with a metaphor or analogy—on the principle of refining low-grade ore. I assume that the first fifty ways that I try it are going to be wrong. I do it by a process of elimination. No matter how back-breaking the shoveling is and running it through the sluices and whatever you have to do to refine low-grade ore, you have the dubious consolation that what you get out of it is just as much real gold as it would be if you were going around picking nuggets up off the ground. It’s just that it takes so damn much labor to get it. (1974, p. 133)

Like many writers, Dickey assumes that hidden in the mass of his early drafts are elements that will make the final text valuable; they will be revealed eventually if he tries to get at them in enough different ways and if he separates out and rejects worthless material (what Bernard Malamud [1975] called “dross”—the waste products from molten metal during smelting). But these rough elements must then be transformed into a valuable product, a difficult, even onerous task. Nonetheless Dickey appears to be confident that the hard work of transformation will indeed eventually result in a product just as valuable as those obtained in easier ways. We cannot let Dickey’s slightly self-deprecating reference to other, easier methods of composition mislead us; the comments of many other writers suggest that few find their “gold” lying about on the ground.