Last night one of my children and I both got sick. He recovered much more quickly than I did, which meant that I was home, trying to relax and recover, with an energetic almost-five-year-old. I still managed to read through and edit about twenty pages of my manuscript. I’m at a pretty fun stage in editing, where there’s a whole, real book there, and I’m mostly making the sentences better, rearranging a few events and crossing items off my “revision to do” list.
If I stop to play “Bug Bingo” at one point and at another point stop to think that it must, in the long run, be of some benefit for my kid to see his parents hard at their own creative work even if he’d rather play Bug Bingo and at still another point stop again as a wave of nausea assaults me . . . at least I am shuffling forward.
Then I began to read the submissions in front of me for this week’s BWW workshop. Reading is a pleasure. That’s what got me into this whole writing business in the first place, and I’d venture to guess the same is true for you. It’s easier to see the structure (and holes) of someone else’s work than your own. I think it has to do with altitude, in the first place. A reader who did not first write the piece floats above it and can see more than the writer who is swimming deep in the manuscript. In the second place, a strange mixture of terror and exaltation combine in the writer to create fuzzy goggles for reading.
Time helps this; other readers help even more.
Sometimes just imagining someone else reading your work will give you a fresh vision of the pages.
In any case, the world devises its distractions and obstacles. Avoid them when you are able, embrace them if you must, but keep on doing your writing. As Marge Piercy says: “Don’t do your enemies’ work for them; finish your own.” I have always taken this to mean that those people and forces that conspire against your work do not need or deserve you as an ally. When you stop writing, stop reading your writing, stop supporting yourself as a writer, you are in essence aligning yourself with the enemies of your writing. Don’t do your enemies’ work for them; finish your own.
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 at work on a novel about Kafka.