Seven Concepts Writers Can Learn From Gold Prospectors
In August I spent a weekend with cousins from Ohio who were visiting the wilds of Idaho near where I live. We took an afternoon to pan for gold above the resort town of Donnelly, which is part of the Boise National Forest.
No, we didn’t stop at a tourist trap, where they salt the trough with pyrite and you get to take home a little pouch of “Fool’s Gold.” I’m talking the real deal. One of my cousins, an astute fifteen year-old, knows enough about gold panning to impress one of the local prospecting supply store owners (yes, we have a couple such stores in Boise). He brought along all the equipment necessary to strike it rich, in case we happened to come across a new Mother Lode.
I was eager to do this because of family ties. My great grandfather was a gold miner in Alaska. He didn’t strike it rich, but his son, my grandfather, had great memories of life in the far north, which I recorded when he was an old man. I used those recollections as background for my historical novel, The Art of Love, the first part of which centers around the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897. Having researched the process of individual gold panning, I wanted to experience it for myself.
So we headed into the forest, ten miles up a logging road, until we found a creek that looked promising. Armed with a pan, a bucket to sit on, and patient instructions from our resident expert (the fifteen year old), I proceeded to seek my fortune the old fashioned way. It was a warm, gorgeous day and my feet felt great soaking in the creek. Being in the mountains is always a plus in those conditions – nothing like the hardships my protagonist dealt with at the end of the nineteenth century. I actually got into the “zen” of sifting and looking, sifting and looking.
Granite Creek
My mind wandered, began making connections between gold panning and writing fiction:
- You’re out to find something that hasn’t been found before. Writers, like miners, want to bring something new and valuable to the table, not just rework something that already exists. We’re willing to venture into the unknown – mentally, at least.
- You don’t need a lot of expensive equipment, just your mind and a strong back. Okay, so shows like Discovery Channel’s “Gold Rush” seem to refute that one since they use giant gold dredges and other equipment, but I’m talking traditional gold panning here. The men and women who struck it rich in California and The Klondike were by and large individuals who put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into the effort, and not much else. As a writer, you can get by with a notepad and pencil if you have to. A strong back helps too, especially with all the sitting or standing you have to do to write.
- To get to the good stuff, you start with a lot of crap. So much dirt to sift through! So many ideas in the world – which one is going to be the One Big Idea?
Sifting, always sifting
- It takes time and patience to sift through all that crap. Gold panning begins with a shovel full of dirt and rock, and it takes quite a bit of time to carefully cull through it to find the nuggets. If they exist, they’re usually at the bottom, not readily apparent. Same with refining your ideas. What might have started out as an intriguing premise often turns out, after thinking it through, to be hackneyed, overused, or unusable for any number of reasons. Much as you hate to do it, you have to let it go and keep sifting.
- It takes skill to bring something valuable to the surface. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can accidentally throw nuggets out with the extraneous rock. So too with writing fiction: you can really mess up a great idea if you don’t have the writing skills to bring it to life.
- You’d better enjoy the process, because sometimes that’s all there is. Let’s face it: rarely does a pan bring forth THE NUGGET, and rarely does a story hit on all cylinders for every reader. So while you’re waiting to hit it big, it’s important to enjoy what you’re doing.
- Keep at it and you’ll be rewarded. Maybe writers have the edge over gold prospectors in this regard. So many miners in the past (like my great-grandfather) never did make it. But those folks followed their dream, and many of them did make it. I’d venture to say that most of those who didn’t strike it rich, still had no regrets. What a time to be alive, full of hope and promise and possibility! As a writer, if you keep at it, and are willing to learn and grow in the process, you’ll make it, virtually guaranteed. Will you strike it rich? I dunno about that. But I do know that you’ll have fulfilled a promise to yourself. You will have created something good and valuable that didn’t exist before. And that’s worth a hell of a lot, even if you can’t weigh it in gold.
A great, day, even without a major strike
By the way, that afternoon I actually did find some gold flakes, which today float in a little vial to remind me that a little bit of treasure still lies out there, waiting to be found.
How do you go about finding that One Great Idea? I’d love to hear from you.
