The Pig Doctor - part one

The humble beginnings of a pig doctor become military medic, leaving behind ripples that will shape the world to come.

Part 1/5

Courtney Shillings was a pig doctor. Unlike most full-blooded Vanut people, he’d never had the desire to explore the world beyond the horizon. No, Courtney was perfectly content watching the waves lap at the shores of the same island, day in, day out. Even as stories of the distant war found their way to him, through the mouths of travellers and traders, he was steadfast in his choice.

 “You have a strong arm,” his sister would say, a babe on her hip and the other children playing nearby. “They could use muscle like yours. Why won’t you go?”

 And he would state, simply, “There would be no one to look after the pigs.”

 The life of their island revolved around the pigs. Crops were grown to feed them until they were due for slaughter, and some were kept on as working animals, breeders, or even pets. Their hide made clothing or armour, their bones tools, their blood and flesh sustenance for the people.

 Courtney, however, hadn’t always been a doctor. As a boy he had helped plough the fields of the homestead, and later became apprentice to a butcher where he enjoyed learning the anatomy of local livestock - from the inside out. When the current butcher could no longer resist the call of the sea and left for the lands beyond the waves, Courtney took his place. It was not until his sister’s prize breeding sow had birthing complications that his steady hand and amassed knowledge were applied to medicine.

 “Uncle, come quick! Betsy needs help and she’ll die if we wait!” one of his nephews pleaded, after bursting into his room in the wee hours of the morning. Groggy, but compliant, Courtney grumbled and immediately came. The sow in question appeared in obvious distress. Weakened, she lay in the centre of an indoor sty with her side heaving. Courtney’s sister Marion hovered worriedly nearby, her knees muddied and her arms slick to the elbow from manually examining the creature’s cervix. Another of her children stood nearby with a pail of gently steaming water and several cloths.

 “They won’t come,” Marion informed him. “She began later than we expected and still has not dilated. The doctor won’t make it before dawn, and I am afraid that it will be too late by then…”

 Courtney kneeled beside Betsy and carried out his own examinations. He had been raised with pigs, as they all had, but he had a butcher’s insight and a steady hand. He didn’t think twice about what had to be done. Orders were barked at the nephew who had summoned him to retrieve a specific set of knives from the Butcher’s shop as he thoroughly washed his hands and forearms. The other child scurried away to bring the herbs that his mother also demanded.

 “I can’t promise she will live,” Courtney sighed, placing a comforting hand on the pig’s neck as he knelt beside her. “But perhaps I can save the piglets.”

 Marion nodded her understanding past a lump in her throat. She had hand-reared Betsy, and the animal had been a part of her life for almost a decade now, but there was no denial in her response. They waited in silence for the children to return, and then Courtney got to work.

 As the sun rose upon the island, Betsy took her last breath.

 The butcher’s bloodied hands rested gently on the creature’s flank as she passed. The sty was quieter now than it had been that night, despite the world awakening outdoors. Seven of the eight piglets had been saved but the stress and loss of blood had been too much for Betsy. He sighed as he rose, his eyes and limbs heavy, and turned to leave. Marion mouthed a thank you to him as he passed her standing in the doorway, her eyes gleaming with withheld tears. He patted her shoulder and summoned a comforting smile. As he stepped outside into the crisp morning air, drawing a deep breath into his lungs, Courtney Shillings made a decision.

 Over the following weeks, the butcher’s shop grew to include a pig surgery. Within just a few months Courtney found himself in high demand; the other doctor on the island was old, and his knowledge generalised across both livestock and people, but nobody knew pigs better than Courtney. Many came to know him as simply the Pig Doctor. He saved lives more often than he lost them, his simple practicality and gentle nature well-suited to the work, and he was content.

 But then the war came.

Reviews

[JayG]

Okay, I’m not going to make you happy, but you did ask, and and you do need to know, so…

First, what I’m about to say has nothing to do with your writing skill or talent. It relates to a misunderstanding you share with pretty much every hopeful writer: Because we learned a skill our teachers called writing, and because we forget that all professions are learned in addition to our school day skills, we assume that the word “writing” that’s part of the profession we call Fiction-Writing refers to the skill we were given. It doesn’t.

When we leave our school days, we know we’re not ready to write for stage or screen. We know we’re not ready to work as a journalist or tech-writer. Yet universally, we assume that, with a bit of practice, a good plot idea, and some luck, we’re equipped and ready to write fiction that a reader will see as equal to the other offerings in the bookstore.

But: Did even one teacher explain why scenes on the page are very different from scenes on stage and screen—and must be? No. Did they even talk about the elements that make up a scene on the page? Why would they? How about the three things we must address quickly on entering a scene so as to provide context? Of course not. That’s knowledge that only professionals in fiction writing require. What we're given some general writing skills that employers will find useful, like writing reports, essays, and letters—all nonfiction applications. But if we don’t know what a scene is, that makes the job of writing one just a bit more difficult. Right?

In your case, like about half of those trying their hand at fiction, you elected to transcribe yourself telling the story to an audience (the other half present it as a chronicle of events). But verbal storytelling is a performance art, where HOW you tell the story matters as much as what you say. In fact, since it’s in the delivery of the story that we present the emotional part of the tale, the performance matters more than the words. Give the same words to two different storytellers and the audience enjoyment might change a good deal between the two, just as the same song will.

Remember...the storyteller—in this case the narrator—is alone on stage with no visual aids. We can’t play the one about to be shot and one doing the shooting at the same time without seeming silly, so instead, we tell the tale in overview. In effect, we verbally give a history lesson, while at the same time illustrating it via our performance. As we speak we vary tempo and intensity. We whisper and shout. We use all the tricks of that marvelous instrument we call the human voice. At the same time, we illustrate emotion with facial expression and eye movement. We visually punctuate with gesture. We amplify or moderate with body language to make the story live for the audience. And as we do that we gauge the audience response to adjust our performance as necessary. And on the audience side, the response of those around us effects how we respond. Look at your own reaction to TV comedians doing a monologue when there’s no audience response to feed on.

But transfer that storytelling to the page and what does the reader get? The history lesson. That's it. None of the performance can be reproduced on the page The emotion you place into reading a given line is replaced by what the punctuation suggests to a given reader. Your performance is gone, because while you can tell the reader that a character speaks a line angrily, or with joy, you cannot tell them how you’d speak your lines. Have your computer read the piece aloud to hear how different what the reader gets is from what you hear when you read it.

And therein lies the reason you weren’t aware if the problem. As you read the first word of the first line you know where and when we are in time and space. You know the characters, their backstory and aspirations, AND, you know where the scene is going. So as you read, the words call up the performance that lives in your mind. As the reader sees the same words, they call up the performance that lives in *YOUR* mind…or try to. See the problem?

But as if that weren't enough, there are other problems, equally difficult to see. As you transcribe, you’ll not include details that are clearly obvious to you. And when you read the story they’re still obvious. But to the reader?

We also assume that in all the reading we’ve done we’ve absorbed the methodology of writing fiction. And we have…about as well as we learn to cook by eating.

The solution? Pure simplicity. Since you’re missing the tricks of the trade you simply add them to your existing writing skills and then practice them till you can use them as needed. It's something every successful writer had to do, and did. So why not you?

I won’t kid you, though. It’s professional body of knowledge, not a simple, “Do this instead of that,” so "coming up to speed" won't be a matter of reading some instructions and then turning out great prose. And because your current writing skills are so deeply practiced that they feel intuitive, they are going to “correct” the wording as you try out the new skills. And because the result will seem “right,” you’ll not notice it till you go back and diagram the motivation/response units and find they’re missing. But it does come. And when it does you’ll wonder why you didn’t see it for yourself.

A great place to find the help you need is the local library’s fiction-writing section. But your library's probably still closed. In any case, I suggest you pick up your own copy of Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It’s the best book on the nuts-and-bolts issues of creating scenes that sing to the reader that I know. It won’t make a pro of you. That’s your job. But it will give you the necessary tools, and an understanding of what they can do for you, which is the best we can hope for. And if you truly are meant to write you’ll love the learning as you shake your head over and over and say, “Damn, that’s so simple…so obvious. Why did I have to have it pointed out?”

Part of the answer to that lies in something we don’t realize. As E. L. Doctorow observed, “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” Problem is, all our training says to give the reader the weather report.

The reports and essays we spent so much time on in school had an informational objective: Make the reader know. So it’s fact-based and author-centric. But fiction has an emotional objective: Make the reader feel. And to achieve that, the techniques are emotion-based and character-centric, a methodology not even mentioned as existing in our school days. Fix that and you’ve traded a sturdy cart-horse for Pegasus. And mounted on a flying beast, who knows where you’ll go?

For a sampling of the issues covered in that book, the writing articles in my blog were intended as an overview of them for the hopeful writer.

So have at it. And while you do, hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/

[Shann Kennedy]

On the contrary to "not making me happy", constructive feedback like this is exactly what I had hoped for in joining this site - so thank you! I lack any education in writing in English beyond primary/elementary school level, and the feedback from friends and family I have shared with is always a frustrating "oh, that's nice!"
I managed to find an ebook copy of Swain's Techniques and have added it to my reading list. I very much appreciate the recommendation, so thanks is in order for that too.
Currently, I'm working to a finished-not-perfect goal to get these first drafts down and out of my head. Taking the elements you have pointed out into consideration going forward (and when returning to revise these segments in a few weeks) will no doubt prove massively helpful.
Thanks again!
Shann