Ever since you were a little girl, you’ve had this one great idea for a story. Check it out: there’s this guy – he’s a poet, and he’s kind of an outcast, but he has like two or three friends who really understand him and who are themselves kind of weird, like he’s got this one friend who’s super into comic books, and the other knows everything about, like, 1980’s ska bands or something. It’s not important, but okay, there’s also this girl that hangs out with them and she’s kind of annoying, but she’s also really cool and like she can fix cars or something. She’s kind of cute, and she has a thing for the poet guy, but he's not that into her and she gets pawned off onto one of the supporting characters, so she gets rejected for not being good enough for the poet guy, but like it isn’t a dick move because she still gets someone or whatever.
At any rate, there’s this one girl that the guy really likes but she doesn’t even know that he exists, or that secretly he’s really cool and they have a lot in common, like both of them totally think that Catcher in the Rye is actually stupid and no big deal, and they both think that team sports are basically for fascists, and the girl is like a violinist or something, then one day they go to a party together and she happens to have her violin, and then he starts saying his poetry as she’s playing, and everyone in school sees how cool they are. Also they are vampires who can fly and then they pork.
You worked on this story for most of your adolescent life, and then continued between drafts into your twenties. You’ve shown it to your mom and she thinks it’s good, and she’s super proud of you, but you’ve been sitting on your final draft for the last six years because someone, somewhere, told you that your stories are precious babies who need to be nurtured, fed, clothed, suckled, and jacked off so that they could come into the world as some sort of Courier New Messiah, totally blowing everyone’s mind and shocking their dulled consciousness into a new paradigm of enlightened thought.
Which, of course, is utter horse shit. I’m not sure where this idea came from (romantic period, I’m looking in your direction) but it’s utter crap that should be stuffed into a brown paper lunch bag, and set alight on your neighbor’s porch, because THAT would make a much better story than the rotten egg you’ve been sitting on and trying to hatch.
Writers have a lot in common with snakes – generally, we sneak through life watching, waiting, striking quickly, not having eyelids, swallowing our food whole and taking weeks to digest it, but also regularly shedding our skins. Writers are receivers, ultimate objects (as opposed to subjects), receiving new stimuli, responding, receiving again, and undergoing a constant process of reinvention. Ultimately malleable and classically liberal, what we are is not what we were.
Sure, you’re saying, how is that any different than anyone else? Everyone else constantly reinvents themselves and also the only constant…is change!!!111oneone
If we are to carry the snake metaphor forward (metaphorward? I just accidentally created the best literary journal title EVAR), then the difference between the constantly reinvigorated writer and the constantly reinvigorated…er…not-writer…is that the writer tacks up his old skins for everyone to see, apparently by evolving thumbs and then devising some sort of industry by which tacks are created.
Okay, this metaphor is just not working.
The point of this post being that writers absorb, release, display, advance. We constantly write new work, abandon the old, and hopefully we don't mistake our identity for our work. What we did back then is not who we are now, but we hope that what we did is worthy of consideration, of study, of appreciation. We hope that someone looks at our work and relates to it, absorbs it, is stimulated by it, but when we’re doing our job right, we don’t mistake the work for ourselves.
Which is exactly what you’re doing by carrying that crusty old story around with you. Imagine if a snake didn’t shed its skin with the seasons: the skin would be filthy, ridden with parasites, flaking from neglect, and utterly repulsive. It would be a disgusting parody of its former self embedded with the filth of years, so perverted from its original form that it would be unrecognizable even to its wearer if the wearer were able to distance himself from it, which of course he can’t because he has trapped himself within it, and is unable to break away because he has never done so before, and he does not know how.
So to make it simple: when you have an idea, get working on it immediately. If you can’t make something of it at first, put your notes in a drawer and come back to it in six months. Still nothing? Forget about it. It was a passing fancy. Got that story written? Proofread, edit, and send it out. Forget your delusions of world-shattering grandeur: if you get it published it will probably be in a journal with a circulation under 1000, and only half of those will read it, but it’s a start, and you can go on to bigger and better things.
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