A morning…wasted…trying to come up with the perfect intro to my article on getting your precious work critiqued by other writers.  I so want my reader to feel the life of the writer, a quiet, introspective life filled with the fears of lions and tigers and bears.  But how do you get the safari hunter to understand the treachery lying behind one misplaced word?  I couldn’t figure it out.  And I think the reason things weren’t going well was the lint on the carpet.  I kept looking down, thinking, and seeing little flecks of white threads, rice, and dust.  Big clumps of dust.  And they were stopping the flow of my creative juices.

I turned away from the keyboard, “Guess I’ll have to vacuum.”  As I pushed and pulled the Eureka down the hallway, I continued to mentally work out my idea.  Maybe I could compare critiques of my work to going to my high school reunion in a white knit top and Jean skirt, only to find that it was a semi-formal evening.  There is definitely no way to hide my white knit in a room sparkling in shiny black lame and sequins.  This indignity at least served to memorialize myself as the first Arcadia High School girl to “drop out” of Delta, the prestigious everybody-wants-to-be-asked-to-join club of cheerleaders and their friends.  I still liked the Delta Girls.  I just knew I wasn’t one of them.  I was a white knit kid, even back then.

And that makes a pretty good story, except that as I pushed the vacuum under the chair, I realized it didn’t really explain satisfactorily why writers simply hate to have other writers read their work.  Oh, sure, I could add a few transitions and use key words like “this is just like”…but it was not going to change the fact that I was trying to force a good story and a good idea into a bad marriage.

Pushing the vacuum into the living room, I contemplated the common human experience of telling a joke that goes flat.  I could explain how this is just like having a story you just wrote go thud in the hands of six people writing critical suggestions in the margins.  I could describe a stack of six manuscripts, precious piles of papers held by paper clips…passing them out to fellow writers around the table and asking them, “What do you think?  Go ahead.  Read.  And tell me what you think.”  And I could work really hard to explain what that feels like.  It’s just like telling a dumb joke in front of an audience.

But the trouble is that telling a dumb joke can sometimes be funny in itself.  I mean, not if you’re Billy Crystal at the Oscars, or even Master of Ceremonies at the company’s annual convention.  But when you’re with friends, and you tell a bad joke, usually they’re nice enough to laugh at the funniness of how bad the joke was and forgive you.  And that never happens when you ask other writers to read your work.

I was in danger of running out of carpet lint, vacuuming my way around the house twice and not having any good idea…until…. In the television room, between the futon and the stereo system, pushing the pillows back against the wall, I glanced sideways and caught my reflection in the dark TV screen.  And I have no idea why at that particular moment my reflection made me think back to my high school speech class, with me standing in front of a room full of juniors, my papers and notes fluttering in my hands.

It’s just that writing is like that.  It’s planning, mulling, trying on and putting off, and starting and stopping, and getting rid of the lint, and then all at once when your human energy is all spent, a miracle occurs.  Someone reaches into your mind and says, “Here, try this one.”  And even if the lint is still there, you don’t see it anymore. 

 

******************************************************

THE WRITER’S LIFE
TABLE OF CONTENTS

******************************************************

Copyright 2013.  All Rights Reserved.