Anne Lamott says that it is okay to write a shitty first
draft. And that is good because that is
exactly what I have done. It’s just part of the process, I keep
telling myself.
I gave my book to a couple of friends to read. They were so encouraging about it too, until I actually clicked send. That was when they started saying things like, “Oh, gosh, I uh… I read the first couple chapters but I uh… I just haven’t had a chance to get back to it. So busy you see, but I have some time next month, and I swear I’m going to hunker down and get it done.”
That is not what I wanted to hear. What I wanted to hear was, Of course I read it all in two days. It completely disrupted my life. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I neglected my children. I couldn’t bring myself to put it down for one second! When are you writing the next one?”
Then I took the clunky thing to the writing work shop that I am taking. And after a series of questions about what I have done so far, someone looked at me and asked, “How long is it exactly?”
“It’s at about five hundred and forty pages now (in it I talk about my love for everyone that I have ever known),” I answered, “and it is nearly done. I have maybe a hundred pages left to go.”
No, no one actually laughed out loud. One person did look at me, however, and say, “If you send a five hundred page long manuscript to an agent, that person will run screaming in the other direction. Do you know that?”
“No, I don’t. This is why I need you. I am just hoping to get it into a state that my friends can tolerate, let alone an agent.”
I have been trying to read back through it myself again lately, and I have discovered that it really is, in spots, like watching a sloth try to make its way over a branch. It is like I have some sort of barrier up. I have created a five hundred pages of head noise; a really long book report of events. I can’t even stand to read it.
My own overriding complaint is that it is too intellectual. And yes, I just said that, in it, I talk about my love. This conflict is perhaps its single biggest problem (although I have been repeatedly told that I am too close to it, that I do not know what its problems are). You see, my brain is not the thing that is attractive to me about me. We have plenty of brains in our every-day lives. We read, and hopefully write, to escape all of that (well, that is the purpose of it for me anyway). The trouble, with this particular story of mine, is that there are flames involved, and that I am an overprotective mother. I have finally succumbed to the inevitable however.
Come to find out, encouraging your inner child is not unlike encouraging an actual child. And I am aware of the redundancy in this statement. It leaves me with that drippy, old adolescent urge to say, “DUH.” But when you have tried to keep your inner child unconscious for many years, when you have stuffed a pacifier into its mouth and rocked it back to sleep whenever it has woken up, and then left it in the crib, hoping, always hoping, that it doesn’t stir when you trip over a toy on the floor on the way out of the room… hell, when you cannot even stand the words inner child, when they leave that strange old, stain on your tongue, and leave your skin trying to creep off of its own body, when you would just as soon such a thing had never existed in the first place, it feels a little strange to be creeping to the crib in the mornings and poking it on the shoulder.
“Psst. Are you awake? I have lollipops. Can I get your help with something today?”
The main problem with a child is that she is not going to sit down calmly and quietly at the dining room table, and do whatever it is that I am asking her to do. I wish she would. I wish that she would sit there attentively and let me interview her.
“And how did you feel when this happened?”
“Well, Miss Jessica, I felt happy. Thank you for asking.”
“And thank you for answering. You may go back to your crib now.”
No. She doesn’t sit still at all. She runs around the room, tearing up paper and coloring on the walls, and making pictures on the table with smeared yogurt. She won’t talk at all for long stretches of time. I watch the clock and wait as patiently as I can, I have other things that I should be doing, you know. And then, when she does talk, she talks to herself while smearing the yogurt; in long, incoherent spurts that I then have to try to record and decipher.
Then there’s the teenager - oh, don’t get me started. She will ramble on and on. After awhile I finally look at her and say, “Jesus, how did anybody ever tolerate you? Oh, that’s right, they didn’t. How did I ever tolerate you? Oh, that’s right, I got you drunk all the time. No wonder you can’t remember much. No, I cannot give you a beer. Sorry, please try to continue.”
“This is how you do it?” I find myself thinking, “Really?”
The re-writing that I have done in this way so far, however, has gotten some beautiful responses from my writing group, from people that don’t even love me. So I just keep doing it, even though it is messy and unpredictable, and even though it leaves me with no way of knowing when the project will be completed. I am obviously not getting any cooperation today though, so I thought I would take the opportunity to throw an update onto the blog. I am off to get prescriptions filled now.
