By Michael A. Black
Okay, I must admit when I heard the subject of this week’s blog, I was thrown for a loop.
Composting? I mean, having grown up in Illinois, which is an agrarian state, I was familiar with the term.
Compost--- n, A compound; converting vegetable refuse into fertilizer; vt, converting (vegetable refuse) into compost. But since I grew up in and around Chicago, the closest I usually got to compost of any kind is when I was forced to go Dumpster diving behind a restaurant in the line of duty.
But my personal knowledge of the subject was a bit thin. Or so I thought. Then I began to think about it.
One of my ex-chiefs was a gardener. He had what you’d call a green thumb. A lot of people said he spent more time worrying about his tomato plants than his patrol officers. One time he almost called out the major crimes task force because some despicable vandal ran through his garden in the middle of the night and squashed some of his prize beauties. I volunteered to go searching through his compost pile for clues. Luckily I found the set of keys I’d dropped the night before, and the crime was never solved. Since the statute of limitations has long since run out, I’ll tell you, yeah, it was me. I was chasing a would-be criminal who got away. But if I would’ve tried to explain how so many of those prize tomatoes got squashed, I know my explanation would have ended up as more compost.
So you see, I’ve had experience with vegetative refuse.
However, as I sat mulling this over, I came up with the idea of looking at composting in a metaphorical way. I mean, isn’t a lot of what we do as writers kind of like composting? Of course it could be argued that sometimes what passes for compost (fertilizer) remains when the final copy has been completed.
I have this file on my computer called “Bits and Pieces.” I can’t claim credit for the name or the idea. My buddy, Earl Merkel, advised me to do it back when we were in a writers’ group together. I took his advice and have been putting stuff in that file ever since. Mostly the stuff consists of passages I’d edited out of my previous works. My editor for A Killing Frost, my first novel, told me to lose an entire subplot involving Shade’s rivalry with a young upstart boxer at the gym. She said it slowed down the main story, and I went to work cutting it out. At first it was like performing surgery on yourself without anesthesia, but after a while it got easier. When I’d finished, I realized my editor was totally right. The subplot was too long and laborious. I’d tried to go one plot too far. But then I was presented with another problem--- What to do with it?
I mean, I still had a sort of affection for the subplot. I’d spent a lot of time on it, and it did contain bits of verbiage that I liked. That’s when Earl suggested I create the Bits and Pieces file. So I did and in the subplot went. It languished in there for a long while, until I decided to pull it out to put it in the second Shade book, Windy City Knights.
“Haven’t I read this before?” my editor asked me.
“No, I just finished it,” I said. But I knew what she was talking about.
“Well,” she said, “this subplot . . .”
“I know. It slows down the story.”
She smiled. “Exactly.”
So it went back in the compost heap along with some more refuse--- I mean unused passages.
I broke from the Shade novels for my third book and did a stand-alone (The Heist). It was written in third person and set during the Great Chicago Flood of 1992. No way could I squeeze in Ron Shade doing some boxing. My editor didn’t need to tell me this time. The subplot languished for a while longer as I did a couple more non-Shade novels. When it came time to revisit Shade for A Final Judgment I was determined to resurrect the ill-fated subplot. The only problem was I realized I’d killed off the young boxer rival in the second novel.
But, like I always say, what’s the use of having compost if you can’t let it ferment a little? (I was actually thinking of quoting Irish Billy Conn, the light-heavy weight boxing champion who challenged the great Joe Louis for the heavyweight championship and actually outboxed the Brown Bomber for twelve rounds before trying to mix it up with the much bigger, stronger Louis in the thirteenth. Joe knocked Conn out cold.
In the dressing room a reporter asked Billy why he hadn’t just kept boxing Louis for the final rounds to win the decision. “What’s the use of being Irish if you can’t be stupid?” Conn replied. But since I’m Scots-Irish, I’ll use my own quote and not risk offending anybody.)
Back to the compost pile: I really liked some of the wording in that unused subplot, but didn’t know how to raise the young boxer from the dead. So I did the next best thing. I changed the character from Marcus, a tough young, Chicago black kid to Allie, a tough, young, Russian kid now living in Chicago. With so many Ruskies coming over here to enter in the fight game, the change seemed natural. Plus, it had sat in the compost pile for so long, I figured it had somehow metamorphosed into something new, or at least unrecognizable. I quickly slipped it in the manuscript and waited.
About a month or so later my editor contacted me.
“I like the new one,” she said.
“Yeah?” I said. Could it be she’d failed to notice it? Perhaps the changes had been more significant than I imagined . . . Perhaps the compost pile had done its work, performed its magic.
“Except for one thing,” she added.
My heart sank. My voice cracked when I asked, “What’s that?” I thought I already knew the answer.
