You have a bright, shiny idea to write something — a poem, song, story, novel, essay, article, speech, or report — and you start to write it down … and it’s not quite right. In fact, halfway through it might even seem not worth finishing.

It happens to me all the time. I deal with that feeling by ignoring it, and I ignore it because I understand what triggers that feeling. I start with a bright, shiny, but somewhat incoherent idea. Then I commit that idea to words, it coheres, and in the process, it changes.

It changes for many reasons, but the main one is that the idea has to move from one form of expression to another, in the same way that turning a painting into a sculpture, or a novel into a movie, brings changes. I was inspired in one kind of expression, which was thought, and now I’m staring at words … and it’s different.

Different isn’t bad. In fact, different can be good. Sometimes an idea improves during the move, or it ventures in a different, equally inspired direction.

Still, the first draft is normally imperfect, even deeply flawed. It’s a first draft, after all, a rough draft. Imperfect is okay. All first/rough drafts have problems, and problems can be solved. Perfection in a first draft isn’t required and shouldn’t be expected.

The first draft must fulfill only one requirement to be worthy: it must exist. I can do anything with that draft, but only if I have the draft. If that draft goes all the way to “the end,” it has achieved a success that rivals the state of a Platonic ideal.

So don’t feel disappointed with your first draft. Instead, load it onto a pen drive or print it out and take it with you to your favorite restaurant or park to celebrate its existence. You have a first draft!

In front of Spain’s National Library in Madrid, a statue of Miguel de Cervantes stands with one foot resting on a pair of books. One of them is spine-out, and we can read its title: Amadís de Gaula (Amadis of Gaul).

That book tells the story of Amadis, from the fictional kingdom of Gaul, who was the greatest knight in the world. This Spanish novel of chivalry, written by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo and published in 1508, became Europe’s first best-seller. It was reprinted 19 times, translated into 7 languages, spawned 44 direct sequels in several languages, and fueled an entire genre that lasted a century. Most notably, around 1600, it inspired Don Quixote of La Mancha.

In many ways, Cervantes satirizes (or pays homage to) that tale, including a characteristic element of novels of chivalry that began with Amadis of Gaul. An earlier version of Amadis had existed since the 1300s in the form of a three-book novel, but Montalvo’s edition was different, as he explains in his prologue:

I corrected these three books of Amadis, such as they could be read, due to poor writers or very corrupt and dissolute scribes, and I translated and added a fourth book and a sequel, Sergas de Esplandián, which up until now no one has seen. By great good fortune, a manuscript was discovered in a stone tomb beneath a hermitage near Constantinople, and it was brought by a Hungarian merchant to eastern Spain in such ancient script and old parchment that it could only be read with much difficulty by those who knew the language.

Of course, Montalvo himself wrote the fourth book and Sergas de Esplandián (Exploits of Espandian; Esplandian is the son of Amadis). Why lie about it? Because, as he himself put it, the novel “had been considered rank fiction rather than chronicles.” By proclaiming it an ancient story and perhaps even forgotten history rather than fiction, it could obtain the status of works by Homer and Cicero.

He doesn’t seem to have fooled anyone, but he did set a pattern for sequels to Amadis of Gaul by other authors. Supposedly, the manuscript for Lisuarte de Grecia (Lisuarte of Greece)by Juan Díaz (1514) had been written in Greek in Constantinople and taken to Rhodes when the city fell to the Ottomans. Amadís de Grecia (Amadis of Greece) by Feliciano de Silva (1530) had been found in a wooden box behind a wall in a cave in Spain, hidden during the Moslem invasion in 711. Silves de la Selva (Silves of the Jungle) by Pedro de Luján (1546) was encountered in the magical sepulcher of Amadis himself, written in Arabic.

And so on. Manuscripts were discovered in distant castles and during voyages to far-off lands. Some were written in Hungarian, Latin, Tuscan, German, Chaldean, and “Indian” (Sanskrit, perhaps). A few were even supposedly written by characters from earlier novels.

Among the many jokes in Don Quixote whose punch line we have forgotten today is the one in Chapter IX. It recounts how, in a market in Toledo, a boy was selling some old papers to be reused. Cervantes looked at one of the pieces of paper, a pamphlet, and it turned out to bepart of the History of Don Quixote of La Mancha, written in Arabic by Cide Hamete Benengeli. He purchased a translation of the pamphlets for two arrobas of raisins (probably about two pecks) and two bushels of wheat. This discovered manuscript, Cervantes said, became the basis of the rest of the first part of his novel.

Rather than being found in some exotic place after a search filled with drama, difficulty, and great cost, Don Quixote was rescued from the garbage and translated on the cheap.

Besides that satire in Quixote, there’s another joke based on one of Montalvo’s books that we’ve forgotten. An imaginary island described in Exploits of Esplandian overflowed with gold and was ruled by a califa. Spanish conquistadors had read many novels of chivalry and sometimes compared the wonders of the New World to the marvels in those books, but when they sailed up the western coast of what we now call Mexico, they found a place that offered little besides rocks and condors. To entertain themselves, they started calling that barren land after the fabulously rich island in the book: “California.”

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A version of this article appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of The Source, a quarterly publication of the American Translators Association Literary Division.

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You can read my translation of Amadis of Gaul here.

I’ve found a portal to another dimension in my apartment building: the missing 13th floor.

You scoff. Lots of buildings don’t have 13th floors, you say. Otis Elevator has explained that it’s not a plot, just a preference. “Due to the superstition associated with the number 13, the unlucky number is often omitted from elevator panels and stairwells.”

I say that’s what they want you to think. Or maybe Otis really believes this because the corporation operates exclusively in our quotidian dimension and doesn’t have all the facts.

True, though, it’s not just this building. The “13th” dimension exists as a horizontal layer across the landscape from building to building. It’s vertical, too. Like many buildings, mine has no 13th apartment units. The numbering goes …1410, 1411, 1412, 1414, 1415…

So, what’s in the 13th dimension? It could be a fantasyland with fairies, elves, unicorns, and the like, living and working in apartments, offices, and hotel rooms, possibly rent-free. The dimension could function as time travel, taking us to the year each building was built. It could be the hub for a physical shortcut, letting us jump from a building in Chicago to a building in New York by opening the right door. Or perhaps something nefarious is operating on the 13th floor…

Think about that when you get on an elevator. Better yet, think about that when you get off. Be sure it’s the floor you want. If you’re looking for the 13th floor, come prepared.

Where will it take you?

“How much of a tree is alive? Certainly not the outer bark. That falls off in dry scales, or can be scraped off down to the white layers within, and the tree be none the worse. Certainly not the wood. One often comes across old trees that have lost limbs or been carelessly pruned, which are entirely decayed out on the inside, so that nothing is left but a thin shell next the bark. Yet these trees grow as vigorously as ever, and bear leaves and fruit like a solid tree. The bark is dead; and the wood is dead. Between the two is a thin layer, perhaps a quarter inch through, which is alive. On one side, it is changing into dead wood. On the other side, it is changing into dead bark. The new wood is alive, and the new bark. Between them is something neither wood nor bark, but just living tree-stuff. The green leaves also are alive, and the green twigs, and the blossoms, and the growing buds. But at least half of every living tree is already dead; while the larger and longer lived a tree is, the smaller proportion of it is alive at one time.”

— from Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know by Edwin Tenney Brewster, physicist and popular science writer (October 11, 1866 – March 14, 1960). More information and links to download the book are here.

Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Space aliens suddenly appear at six different places on Earth, stay a little while, then go away, paying no attention at all to humanity. They leave behind apparent trash, the way careless picnickers might stop alongside the road, eat lunch, and then depart, leaving behind trash that would mystify the squirrels and ants, and some of it might be toxic.

Thirteen years later, in one of those places, a city called Harmont, scientists are trying to understand what was left behind, and “stalkers” are trying to smuggle out everything they can because there’s a profitable market for the trash. Organized crime slowly edges out science, even though some of the trash is terrifyingly toxic.

As a first contact novel, Roadside Picnic takes an uncommon approach. We humans can’t understand the aliens, and they might not be interested in us anyway. We can only react — and we react in the way we always have to any novel situation. In this case, in the city of Harmont, a corrupt society grows more corrupt, but not without sufficient self-awareness to understand and debate why it is heading down that violent, destructive road.

My only quibble is that the novel focuses relentlessly on Harmont with no clue about what is happening at the other sites. Were there other kinds of responses? I think the addition might have added depth, but the novel is plenty visceral and fascinating as it is, a deserved classic in science fiction.


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