Kill Your Darling…Babies? Oh My. Compton, Ford & Meding 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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“Given the number of stories I have neglected, ignored, mistreated and outright abandoned, I definitely do 
not like to think of my work as my children. Horror is my preferred genre, so even the best of my “babies”–nurtured with care to their fullest potential–are destined to be screwed up and twisted. Worse still, I desperately try to sell all of them off to complete strangers for a modicum of personal profit, fame, adulation and fulfillment.
If my stories were my children I would be obligated to buy a “World’s Worst Dad” t-shirt and coffee mug, at the very least.
A metaphor that’s less apt to give me nightmares or lead me to the crippling realization that I am a disturbed human being is that my stories are creations developed and cultured by various, questionable scientific processes. I tend to think of my workstation at home—my simple desk and computer—as a laboratory; a carryover I think from my days as an aspiring hip-hop artist when I used to refer to the recording studio as the “lab” like so many other rappers.
I am a scientist–perhaps insane, intelligent, both or neither–employing formulas, experimentation and inspiration to manufacture my “creations.” I can accelerate or decelerate their growth as needed. I can leave any particular project alone in its own self-sustaining, nutrient-rich soup to work on another project that is in greater need of my attention, comfortable in the knowledge that when (or if) I return to the initial project it will not have deteriorated or broken containment and run amok. Although, to be honest, I don’t think I would mind the latter.
I monitor and encourage the progress of these artificial organisms. Stories after all have some approximation of life and—with their characters and environments—are also home to a multitude of smaller symbiotic life forms. If I observe any of my creations evolving in a way that is inconsistent with their planned development I can surgically prune and mold them to fit the desired shape. Or, alternatively, I can say, “Wow, it appears to be growing an extra arm. Let’s see where this goes.” All in the hope of creating something so horrific, compelling, or horrifically compelling that people will pay me just to view it, and ask me questions like, “How in the world did you come up with /that/?”
That this metaphor is less apt to give me nightmares than the “my book is my baby” metaphor probably says something about me I might be better off not thinking about. It all sounds so cold and joyless, but I promise it’s not. I love my work—the process and the product equally. But I don’t feel like I can afford to get too attached to a single story that may or may not grow into something worthwhile. I never start a story believing that it will turn out lousy, or that it is destined to go unfinished, but the possibility is something I am always aware of. It is similar to boarding a plane: if you /believed/ it would crash you probably wouldn’t get on the flight, but the possibility of a crash is always there buried in your mind.
Anyway, I’ll start winding this down now before I find even more metaphors to clumsily throw into the mix. Hopefully this answered the question and was a tiny bit entertaining, or at least comprehensible. For my part, this helped me to better understand my own motivations and methods. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I hear one of my dear creations beating against the glass of its confinement cylinder.
Back to the lab I go.”
-Johnny Compton, horror writer, blogger
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“My book isn’t my baby–it’s more like my teenage son with a freshly-minted driver’s license. I’ve given over the keys, the car has a full tank of gas, and now I’m staying up late wondering when he’ll be home and what kind of adventures he’s had. Once the book is out there in the hands of readers, it takes on a life of its own. And as much as I try to shepherd the process, there’s only so much I can do at that point. As they say in latin, spero meliora–I hope for better things.”
-Jamie Ford, author of the bestselling HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET
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“The more I learn about writing, the funnier I find the “my book is my baby” metaphor. I understand how it applies to the creation (to the planning and writing) of a book—to an extent. You create a baby, sure, but you 
don’t edit a baby, query a baby, or sell a baby to the highest bidder for mass reproduction and distribution across the country. At least, no responsible parent I know does.
Babies are fragile things that must be nurtured and protected and taught. Books are fluid things that often need to be ripped apart and put back together in order to improve the finished product. Babies are born with all of the genetic material they’ll need to grow into an adult. First drafts of books are written too long or too short, with too many characters or not enough, subplots are added or removed—in short, books are rarely “born” with everything they need.
I know it isn’t a perfect metaphor, and I doubt the first person to say “my book is my baby” meant it literally, but it’s difficult to not giggle at the logical fallacy of such a statement. Writers who apply that metaphor to their work are setting themselves up for trouble, because criticism is part of the process. No one is going to say “your baby’s nose is too flat for her face,” but they might say “chapter three is boring and doesn’t fit with the rest of the narrative.” Applying the baby label makes the book personal, which in turn makes criticism personal. And neither books nor criticism are personal—not if you plan on being a selling author.
We buy and sell products, and consumers want the best possible product for their money. I don’t say this to devalue the importance of creativity and artful prose. Far from it. No one wants to buy a dry, boring, badly-written book. But I bet they don’t want to buy your baby, either.”
AuthorScoop
