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 on Thursdays, on one question:

Is your book your baby?

(view the entire essay collection here)

……………………………………….

“Are my novels like my babies, or even my child?

I have to say no.  More like each tale is a new best friend. They’ve got the keys to a fast car and a wicked look in their eye.  They have a journey in mind, some destination with adventures along the way. I get to go along for the ride.  Sometimes I get to drive for a short while, but mostly I’m in the backseat, with a keyboard, trying to keep up.  Now and again I’m back there praying we don’t run out of gas.

Sad to say it, though, I am a fickle friend. When the adventure is done and the story is told?  I’m looking around for a new best friend, hoping they’re driving something cool.”

-author and writer-tech expert, Eldon Hughes

***

“Are my scripts my babies?  Eh… no.  No, they’re more like… I don’t know… circus monkeys.

What do you mean, “go on”?

Well, work with me here.  See, I’m the guy in the red dangly coat with the top hat, you know, the important one with the loud voice, and my monkeys are the ones that run around doing all the tricks, impressing the audience and drawing investors (hopefully), and all with the minimum of screeching and tossing of faeces—though that happens more often than you’d ever want to know about.  Think of them as prizes.

Anyway, when my monkeys go out there and perform and do well, I couldn’t be happier. They’re mine—I did that.  I trained them and nurtured them and ran them over with a floor-buffer for that final polish.  It’s the closest I come to feeling parental towards them and their cute little fanged faces. (They’re all for sale, by the way.)

But some of the time, the monkeys fail and I’m left to deal with it.  “I didn’t connect with your monkey,” says one. “Your monkey threw his peanuts at me,” says another.  “One went in my eye and I’m going to sue.”  OK, that was an actual real monkey incident which I’m unwilling to discuss but you get the idea.

See, I can believe in them.  I can be sure they’re the best they can be and that people will love them.  But come show-time, it’s out of my hands.  I can’t account for the fact that it’s just the wrong time for a monkey-show right now, or that the audience has seen it all before, or that all the frothing at the mouth really was rabies.  Again.  (Did I mention they’re for sale?)

I can be hard on my monkeys then.  I’ve been known to take a belt to them and yell things like, “You call that a midpoint?!  Don’t you know a good midpoint falls around page 55-60?  What the hell are you doing up there in the 70s? Gah!”

Sadly, the show must go on and only the best get to perform.  If something’s not working, you’ve got to be tough about it.  Yank that monkey.  Get a dress on it.  Teach it the harmonica.  Anything.  Sometimes they can be whipped into shape.  Other times I have to let them go—relegated to the cage in back where maybe one day they’ll buck their ideas up and do something original before my circus licence expires.

It’s not always easy—you try getting a shako on a monkey—but when all is said and done, it’s my job and it’s a job I love.

So no, my scripts are not my babies.  But they are my monkeys.

Now, how many monkeys do you want?”

-screenwriter, Chris Hyde

***

Never! Writing is a labor of love, I’ll give you that. But it takes a hard, cold eye to be successful. I would be the Susan Smith of the writing world if they were my babies. I’ve neglected, abused, and killed too many fully formed manuscripts to subscribe to that idea.

They are more like marathons to me. I start out hyped and zoom along feeling great for about the first third, then comes the hill. During the second third of the book I alternate between believing I’m an Olympian and contemplating slitting my wrists. I like to call it the Hemingway-Moron pendulum. It swings one way, then the other. Day by day, mile by mile, I am either a genius or an idiot, but I take comfort in knowing that neither is permanent. At some point it becomes a one-foot-in-front-of-the other sort of race. Write the next scene. Write the next scene. Write the next scene. As I near the end, my energy surges again and I find new momentum, usually because I’m sick to death of it and I can’t wait to ditch it. When it’s finally done, I’m tired but elated, and I remember every excruciating step. But that’s just the process. I may have to stuff it in a closet and pretend I never conceived of such a horrid thing.

-Heather Sharfeddin, author of SWEETWATER BURNING

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 12:18 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.