Pregnancy, childbirth, and parental attachment metaphors abound in this business.  Strain at the plot arc and grind your teeth through the editing pains and you’ve given birth (or at least served as midwife) to a new thing, a wobbly creature you christen with a title, then swaddle in cover art.  Endure criticism and it stings like having your baby defamed as hard-on-the-eyes.  Ask many a writer and you’ll hear that the task of peddling a manuscript is nothing short of turning out your very flesh and blood into the cold, cruel world.

Life is hard, but literature is a nursery of horrors.

Or is it?

AuthorScoop has invited authors of every stripe to weigh in, three at a time on Thursdays, on one question:

Is your book your baby?

(view the entire essay collection here)

……………………………………….

“It’s true my books feel like my babies, but the metaphor only goes so far.  A parent is hardly the only force shaping and nurturing a child, and a child can survive the loss of a parent.  In this sense, the relationship of an author to his story is both more one-dimensional and more critical:  there are no other forces beyond the author to shape and nurture the story, and without the author, the story can’t possibly survive.

It’s a big responsibility.”

-bestselling author, Barry Eisler

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***

“Babies grow. Yes, I feed them. But the growing is magic. It happens on its own. And if I’m late with my part, the kids don’t let me forget. They protest. They demand. “Mom, I’m hungry!”

My books-in-progress on the other hand, are quiet. If I put them away in a drawer, they don’t make a peep. They demand nothing. If I slack off, they wait. They don’t gain height while they sleep. There’s no “my how you’ve grown!” or surprise that their sleeves are suddenly too short. Any growing they do is something I must consciously make happen, word by word.

Publishing a book is like seeing a child off to adulthood. You must let it have its own relationship with readers, and it may not tell the exact story you had in your mind when you wrote it.”

-Emily Winslow, author of the newly-released suspense, THE WHOLE WORLD

***

“When nobody on planet earth wants to look at your baby, it’s a bit of a death knell to your soul. You look at him and you think, ‘but he’s beautiful…if only you would take a moment to look at his face—into his heart—you will see what I see’. And so it goes. Time and again you are being told, “No thank you. I’d rather not look at your baby if it’s all the same to you.” It happens so often that you begin to steal sideways glances at your child. ‘Well, maybe he’s not so pretty after all. Was that blemish there before? How did I not see that?’ You eat yourself up. You convince yourself that you have an ugly baby and you are ashamed that you’ve been too blinded by love to notice this fact. But then you remember the birth pains…and pleasures. You remember how he slipped through the birth canal, as though from nowhere. You remember those late nights that you spent slipping between pain and wonder. Then you remember watching him grow from but a kernel in your belly to this full-blown strapping child, complete. You ignore those voices in your head that tell you to notice the flaws, the scars, the dents. You tell yourself you’ll be okay. You have a beautiful baby. And you begin again. You ask another person, “Please…will you take a look at my baby? He’s really quite beautiful. All you have to do is ask…and he’s all yours. I trust him enough to send him out into the world. I raised him right. He’ll do me proud. Just look…that’s all I’m asking.”

-author, poet, playwright, Kevin Craig

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 6:09 pm and is filed under *Jamie's Posts, AuthorScoop Exclusives, Kill Your Darling... Babies?, The Writing Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.