Kill Your Darling…Babies? Oh My. French, Cameron & Dunn Weigh In
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)
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“In a very general sense, the first two parts of the metaphor work for me: the book slowly develops inside, and getting it out is damn hard work. The last part, though - the child-raising part - doesn’t. Once the book’s out in the world, it’s very definitely not my baby - in fact, I don’t even think of it as ‘mine’ any more: it belongs to readers. If I try to have any say in the way it grows and develops from that point on, or in the way those readers interact with it, not only will I make myself nuts, I’ll never get another book written. Frankly, I tend to ignore a book from the second it hits the shelves. When it comes to the book-mothering metaphor, I’m probably one of those fish that takes care of the eggs till they hatch and then wanders off.”
-bestselling author, Tana French.
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“Let’s get some perspective here, shall we? If, hand on heart, you can truly claim to afford equal status in 
your affections to both your book and your child, either you’re taking your hobby far too seriously or you’re a terrible, terrible parent.
It’s not that I don’t understand what you’re saying. Like my child, my book is a product of me. I conceived it, I carried it around inside me for many months, and its transition from inner demon to trembling foal caused me pain, anguish and a surprising degree of blood loss. Given that I conceived my book unaided (not to mention being laughably deficient on the womb front), this was surely a miracle of creation to rival any other.
I am, of course, leading to a However.
You see, the key word up there was ‘product’. Anyone who tells you their novel ‘took on a life of its own’ and/or ‘wrote itself,’ perhaps with a bit of ‘nurturing,’ is most likely the sort of person who gives their car a cutesy name and feels sorry for the stale biscuit at the top of the pack that goes in the bin all by itself rather than being eaten. They’re also doing themselves a disservice; since a novel is not a biological organism, let alone a sentient one, nurturing and encouraging it will have no effect on its development.
But, “Oh,” they say, “there’s so much of me in my book! I’ve truly poured my heart and soul into this, my life’s masterpiece!”
Well I’m sorry, but no, we haven’t. This is not a science experiment - it’s an art, and not the dubious modern kind that requires us to get drunk and fling our vital fluids at the canvas. Nor, regardless of what you might have been told (or have told others), does the creative process compel us to tear off a pound of our own flesh and mail it to our agent. Granted, if we’re halfway human then we might have infused our words with some small reflection of our personality, but when all of the angst, ego and overstatement are stripped away, all we’re really doing is inventing stories in our head and arranging them in the manner we imagine most likely to land us a five-book deal. Like all great products, a novel is two parts ingenuity and one part pure, cynical salesmanship.
Now don’t get me wrong; for the most part I’m proud of what I’ve written. I enjoy it, I’m thrilled when you enjoy it, and I jealously guard my ownership of it. But I don’t long for the end of the day when I can hurry home to play with it, or sit and watch in misty-eyed amazement as it drops off to sleep at night. I don’t feel eternally bound to it with every fibre of my being. If you threaten to destroy it, I won’t respond with terrifying violence. It doesn’t love me unconditionally, nor I it. Because while I may have created it from ingredients I found in my head, my book is not a part of me.
Do I mind if you take my life’s work and pass it off as your own? Certainly, just as I mind if you steal my grandfather’s watch.
Would I run back into a burning building to rescue the last remaining copy? Hell no. It’s just some shit I made up.”
-novelist and editor, Graeme Cameron
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“People sometimes ask, ‘Which is your favourite book?’ I tell them, ‘They’re my children. You don’t choose favourites among your children.’
Sending a completed ms to an editor is like sending a child out into the world, to be judged by other people.”
AuthorScoop
