“a tear near the seams” by devi laskar

My children demand stories of me. They call them “make-up” stories and they do not mean making up from a fight. They mean the battle itself of creating something from nothing, of piecing together characters and throwing problems at them and rallying those characters to take action and imagining the results of that action and new problems.

It is exhausting. Who does this stuff for a living? It’s like giving baths for a living, changing diapers. Who can do it well except as a labor of love? (Now I hear BWW member Bree reminding me that nurses do these hard jobs and more.) Still, the call to invent on demand, to invent and to simultaneously entertain—it’s not for the weak of heart.

And the first job of that strong heart is to cheer yourself on.

For there is a voice that rises up out of the busy, dreamy, challenging act of creating to say, “That is so terrible. How could you write that? That’s cliché. It’s boring. It’s stupid and worthless.”

I’m here to tell you that that cruel voice is fiction.That’s right. You are inventing the taunts and barbs of that voice and it is no truer than the cowboys and cousins and gardeners that you are inventing in your prose. Like them, it’s grounded in something you’ve encountered before and then twisted to make it all your own. In the case of that cruel voice, it’s grounded in fear. The fear of

being bad, of getting it wrong. Oh, I have it, too, friends. But as I write it I see so clearly how crucial being bad and getting it wrong are to any kind of success or creativity, to any form of a first draft. 

It’s later, in the editing, in the care you take with the discoveries and roughed out sketches you’ve gotten onto the page earlier, where your responsibility lies to make it as good as you are able. There and not before.

You cannot ask of yourself that you start writing with a second (or third or twelfth) draft. It’s impossible. You must start with a first draft. And whether that first draft is brilliant or terrible is irrelevant. The first draft must only be finished. The rest will follow.

When my children call for a make-up story, they are asking me to lead them into a world that will make them laugh or cry or wonder or worry or all of these, sequentially and at once. The high-wire act of unrolling the wire as I go with no net to catch me is, no doubt, part of the fun. So is hearing something they’ve never heard before. Sure, they recognize all the potluck bits I steal from the life around us, but they are piecemeal combined into something new. What a delight.

It terrifies me, every time. I tell myself that is ridiculous. I’m a writer. Shouldn’t inventing stories be as easy to me as typing? I resisted learning how to type so I wouldn’t ever do what my mother did when times got tough: be a secretary. But in fact, typing so many pages so many times, I’ve learned the strange order of the keys on the board. I’m not at 100 words/ minute like my mom, but I’m not so slow, either. Why have I not mastered unscrolling a story in the same way?

So next time you sit down to write, see the eager faces of two little kids who are asking for invention, for wisdom, for adventure—for story—and who know that if only you are willing, you can begin it now and carry it all the way through to the end.

Elizabeth Stark is the author of the novel Shy Girl (FSG, Seal Press) and co-director and co-writer of several short films, including FtF: Female to Femme and Little Mutinies (both distributed by Frameline). She earned an M.F.A. from Columbia University in Creative Writing. Currently the lead mentor and teacher at the Book Writing World, she’s taught writing and literature at UCSC, Pratt Institute, the Peralta Colleges, Hobart & William Smith Colleges and St. Mary’s College. She’s just finished a novel about Kafka.