Wilderness Quest: A Study in Substantive Editing

"A man of Action will always leave the world with unfinished business …"
—Anonymous

Background:
    Abu-Abu: A Wilderness Quest was the self-ascribed magnum opus of my late father, Cliff Sakry.  He started writing the book in the late 1960s and continued to work on it until his death in 1988.  The title is a spin-off from a Teddy Award-winning short feature film, Wilderness Quest, which he also wrote and produced in affiliation with Promotional Films, Inc., Hopkins, Minnesota, in 1964.

    While the book uses the same title and relatively same setting as the film (each uses a high-adventure wilderness canoe trip as its vehicle) … there is little actual resemblance between the two.  There is, however, a common wilderness preservation ethic pervading both works, which is how my father perhaps justified recycling the film's title.

    Cliff Sakry described the work as follows:

Wilderness Quest is the story of an adventurous party of fathers and sons on a rugged wilderness canoe trip into the Canadian Quetico in 1963.  It is filled with all the excitement and thrill of discovery linked with wilderness canoeing, camping, and exploring—but it is a little more than that.   By its full title, it is a tale of "search and discovery": first, of a remote edenic island on the hidden Lake of Echoes, a place of mystery and enchantment known only to a few who have heard its ancient legend; second (and its primary object), it is a search for a clearer understanding of the strange universal pull toward wild things and places which so many of us feel and which we find so irresistible.  It ultimately conveys a universal message to those who are especially sensitive to the deeper, probing concerns surrounding humankind's place on this planet.

The Assignment:
    At the time of his death, Cliff Sakry had not yet completed his manuscript.  Even though he was a prolific and respected writer in numerous disciplines throughout his life, he admitted to having had particular trouble concluding this project.  He had never before taken on a task of such personal importance, nor one that was more ideologically demanding.  As his son, I suspect he feared philosophical criticism.  As an editor, I suspect he feared literary rejection.  He was, without question, far more masterful at lyrical prose (and certainly poetry) than at autobiographical narrative and dialogue, of which a sizeable portion of Wilderness Quest consists.

    I'm also certain he realized this, himself.

    But he was also a remarkably incisive thinker.  And his romantic lyricism—as anyone who ever shared his company around a campfire, or who has ever read his essay, "Beguiling Goddess: A Wilderness Moon" (actually excerpted from this book), will attest—was absolutely peerless.

    When he died, the manuscript consisted of roughly thirteen chapters, the last several of which required a considerable amount of original new material.  His last request of me was that I finish it.

The Challenge:
    Even while my father was alive—and in spite of the fact that the lyricism in his work remains, even to this day, profoundly captivating—I found that Wilderness Quest needed considerable reworking.  It was outdated, there were significant problems with gender and ethnic (mostly Native American) references [view example], and its dialogue was substantially overwrought.

    The greatest challenge to me was how to "vernacular-ize" (and even eradicate) superfluous portions of dialogue—especially philosophical discussions around camp—without disrupting the very crucial ideological thread of the narrative.  This might prove impossible without substantial rewriting.

    Perhaps the biggest problem was that the ideological thread started to fray in later chapters, and the book's philosophical message remained unconcluded at the time of his death.  And even though I had a good grasp of  my father's "philosophy," we truly did share some profound ideological differences.  I was particularly challenged with where the concept of human greed started extending beyond his core wilderness preservation ethic into his fundamental (almost anthropocentric) world view.  My view was holistic … antithetical in many ways.

    While I would have little trouble as an editor authentically advancing the ideologies he had already sketched-out in the earlier chapters, I would be hard put to originate any kind of "grand" philosophical conclusion—in his genuine voice—toward the yet unfinished end.

    Also, he intended to have two sections in the book: Low Rock (set in the Canadian Quetico) and High Rock (set in the Rocky Mountains).  The action (and ideological development) of the story was to take place in the locale of the former and the philosophical conclusion was to, shall we say, crescendo … on the mount!

    My father was much given to such archetypes.  I would opt to cut them.  He already had gone too far, it seemed to me … with too much firelight, too much explaining, too much diatribe.  An all-conclusive "revelation" on the mount, at best, would be anticlimactic.

The Task:
    Given the circumstances stated above (as well as factors of time) I decided to at least work the piece into marketable "query" form—without the problematic final chapters—then conform editorially to the publisher's requirements and finalize the manuscript "after the sale."   (At that time I was accustomed to working with publishers on assignment.)  I thought that for the sake of a fair editorial appraisal the narrative should at least be brought to the point where the canoe party arrives at the mythical island of the Indian legend. 

    This took me approximately two months.   And I opted to edit no further (with the exception of an excerpt from a later, unedited chapter which I converted to an essay titled "Beguiling Goddess: A Wilderness Moon," published in the June-July, 1995 issue of Lake Superior Magazine).

    I substantively edited—to a great extent, rewrote—eight chapters, the prelims, prologue, and Indian legend (which provided the geographical, as well as ideological, basis for the "quest").  This amounted to approximately two-thirds of the book.  I was certainly ready to stop.  I felt the ground shake every time I slashed yet another paragraph (or two) of the stilted dialogue from my late father's belabored magnum opus.

Conclusion:
    I succeeded in most of my editing objectives, technically.  But as I had predicted, I was destined to falter in my substantive address to this manuscript.  Not so much because the author of the narrative was my father, but because my father simply did not turn out to be an especially adept author of ideological narrative.  He agonized to formulate; he agonized to conclude.  He left too much unfinished.  He was much more accomplished at subjective writing forms, particularly lyrical prose … a great deal of which (ironically) carries entirely through his wilderness opus.  Like a song!

    I was not entirely off the hook either, I found.  I was soon to discover that, in my attempt to retain voice, I did not thoroughly correct my father's problematic dialogue.  One publisher to whom I submitted my final edit, along with my father's original version of the manuscript, returned:

It's a fascinating story, and I think you've done a good edit (especially considering that the author is your father).  I do see one significant problem with the manuscript:  In a  number of sections, long and rather stiff passages of dialogue prevail.  These sections, in my judgement, could use more action/description and much less conversation.  But that's one person's opinion.

    Still, Wilderness Quest is quite an interesting study in substantive editing, if simply from the standpoint that I had to resist constant temptation to replace my father's voice with my own.  The narrative limitations, as lamented above, were predisposed—indeed, like a mine field!  And the opus remains regrettably (perhaps deplorably to a few who were close to him and waited for its promised completion for twenty-some years before he died) … an unfinished work.  It may remain so.

    But like most of Cliff Sakry's writing, it is invariably worth a read.

~ CMS

02/23/99

Click here to view example of editing for ethnic and cultural authenticity in this work.

Click here to view the original version of Abu-Abu: A Wilderness Quest by Cliff Sakry (1985) in .PDF format.

Click here to view the edited version, Pungishemoo: A Wilderness Quest by Cliff Sakry (1985) with C. Mark Sakry (1992) in .PDF format...AND...

Click here to view the accompanying edited version of The Tale of Pungishemoo (a separate file).

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