Two Rules of Six

by Mary Lou Condike

A tall stack of paper stared back at me. I had horsewhipped myself into completing a draft of my first novel. Next, I would grapple with the daunting task of editing and revision.

During a recent critique session, a veteran writer introduced me to the “rule of six.”  It could take months or even years to polish and tighten the text suitable for publication. Maybe never, I’m told. A first novel rarely makes it.

“The rule of six applies to the number of revisions you should expect to make on a manuscript before submitting it for publication,” she explained.

Her information spun my mind back to a time before the dawn of typewriters or computers. All I knew about eighteenth-century writers like Defoe, Voltaire, and Swift was that they penned their novels with a quill and ink onto rag paper or parchment.

I set the manuscript aside. “Later,” I told myself.

***

The following week, my husband and I took our granddaughters, Emily and Ava, on a field trip to the Historic Deerfield Village in Deerfield, Massachusetts where we experienced a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century world. A time when writers worked without modern writing tools, such as ballpoint pens, typewriters, or God forbid, computers.

Our tour included a dozen historic homes and public buildings, a boxed lunch, and ended at the girls’ favorite spot, the gift shop. At the final stop before the gift shop, my granddaughters climbed the stone steps into a one-room schoolhouse built in the early 1800s.

“Welcome to the Wapping School. What are your names and how old are you girls?” A neatly dressed middle-aged lady asked.

“Ava. I’m eight.” Ava fiddled with a piece of chalk on a front-row desk.

“Emily, fifteen.”

“Emily, you can sit wherever you’d like.” She turned to Ava. “And you should sit in a row four or five where children your age would have sat.”

Eight rows of crude desks, their heights from knee-high to hip-high, faced a slate chalkboard in the front of the room. Each chairback supported the desktop behind it. They fit together like spoons in a drawer. 

“Why doesn’t my desk have a piece of slate and chalk like the desks in the first rows,” Ava asked.

“Because the younger students with undeveloped motor skills sat in front. By their third year, most could master ink and paper, and didn’t need the slate and chalk,” the docent explained.

Emily elected to sit near Ava in the middle of the classroom, even though it was a bit of a squeeze. I stood at the rear and watched. They giggled as they arranged themselves at the medium-sized desk.

“You’re too big Emily.” Ava giggled again.

Emily’s knees pushed up against the desk, so she wedged herself in sideways. Ava could barely reach the writing surface even when she sat on the front edge of the seat.

“What did the kids who sat here write with?” Ava peeked inside the desk. “No pencils!”

The docent held up a jar filled with goose feathers. “These.”

“No way!” Her eyes widened.

“And this.” She held up a small inkwell labeled India ink.

“Why didn’t they use pencils?” Emily asked.

“Good question. Carpenters and artists used pencils, but the pencil as we know it wasn’t available until around 1870.”

“How can I erase when I make a mistake?” Ava turned up her palms and shrugged.

“You can’t.”

Emily sat quietly and listened.

“And they wrote parchment and rag paper.” The docent held up a sample, then explained, “This is parchment paper. It’s a dried animal skin.”

“Ewww!” The girls reacted in unison.

The docent smiled and raised the other sample. “Rag paper is made from cotton, linen, or reeds.”

“That’s not so bad. I’d use rag paper,” Ava said as she nodded.

“Are those the feathers they used for the pens?” Emily pointed at a jar of feathers sitting on the bench along the wall.

“Yes. Those are goose feathers. But that’s not the only type they used.” The docent retrieved five unique feathers from her desk drawer at the front of the room. She held each one up and identified the donor. “An eagle, a hawk, a swan, a raven, and a crow.” She further explained that raven and crow feathers worked best for fine printing, and that only the large feathers found on a bird’s wingtip provided suitable quill pens.

“It’s against the law to have eagle feathers,” Ava pointed out.

“It is now but was legal back then.” The docent held up a small knife. “Do you know what this is?”

“A pocketknife,” Emily answered.

“Close. It’s a penknife used to cut an angle at the tip and slit the point to let the ink flow.”

“I bet it’s sharp.” Ava’s eyes widened.

“Very. Too sharp to have around children.” She moved to the front of the room and pointed at a tool with a round blade. “Schools used this wheel to sharpen the tips of their quills. Usually, one of the older boys would get the job.”

“Thomas Jefferson was prolific writer and raised geese so he would have an ample supply of quills. During his life, Jefferson wrote more than twenty thousand letters and used at least three thousand quill pens.” She further explained that a healthy goose could produce sixty feathers before it died.

“How did they get the feathers off the goose?” Ava scowled.

“They plucked them,” Emily quickly answered.

“True. Or they collected feathers from the ground in the spring and fall during the molt.”

“Geese melt?” Ava exclaimed.

Emily laughed. “No silly. They drop their feathers.”

“Over his lifetime Jefferson owned at least fifty geese.” She bowed her head. “Thank you, Jefferson geese for your donation to American history.”

The girls snickered. I couldn’t help but smile.

“Would you like to try writing with a quill pen?”

Both girls nodded.

“We don’t use parchment or rag paper. It’s too expensive.” She handed each girl several pieces of white construction paper.

“Which hand do you write with?” she asked.

“We’re both right-handed,” Emily answered.

She presented a mason jar filled with feathers. “These are feathers from the left wing of a goose. If you were left-handed, you’d use a feather from the right wing. This allows the feather to curve over your hand out of your line of sight.”

Each girl chose a writing quill. Ava picked the largest feather in the jar and began tickling Emily until Emily gave her the “don’t-do-that-again” stare.

The docent held up the ink. “Instead of the disgusting mixture of soot, oil, and monkey glue that our ancestors used, I’m going to have you use India ink.”

“Monkey glue?” Ava threw back her head and laughed.

“It dissolves the soot and dries without seeping into the paper.” The docent smiled. “They’d make a stew of monkey skin, water, and musk, then mix in lamp oil and soot.”

She dipped a quill tip into the well while explaining capillary action and how it allowed the ink to fill the quill without dripping., Then she wrote a sentence in cursive to demonstrate the technique, carefully applying light pressure to the tip. A fine stream of ink flowed onto the paper.

The room quieted for the first time since we’d entered as they dipped quills into ink. Initially, neither girl produced a legible mark, but Emily managed a sentence and her signature. Ava’s heavy hand flattened her quill tip, squirting ink all over her paper and part of the desk. After a dozen Rorschach spots, she wrote her name. She’d had enough. “Can we visit the gift shop now?”

***

Back in my office on Monday, I stared at my manuscript.

Recalling my granddaughters’ agonizing attempts at using a quill, I winced thinking about the task for early writers. Cut-and-paste had a whole new meaning as I reflected on their revision process. I envisioned long tables covered with sheets of paper where a gust of wind could scramble an entire book in seconds. Did early writers strike the clunky or excessive words using scissors? I found it incomprehensible for more than one revision. And six revisions would have felt like a botched hanging, slow and painful.

Today I planned to tackle my first of six revisions. Technology had eased my burden. In seconds, I could slice out the clunky words and in months, not years, produce a book free of excess baggage and perhaps refine my page-turning hooks.

I snatched a red pen and drew my chair up to my desk.

I would not let a stack of paper beat me. I’d revise this manuscript until I was confident that I’d complied with another “rule of six” promoted by George Orwell.

No cliches.

Use short words.

Cut excess words.

Avoid passive voice.

Use equivalent English for foreign or scientific words.

Break the rules if necessary to keep things clear.