Building babies out of Bathwater

“It’s not funny.”

“Sure it is. You just don’t get it. The mouse—“

“Oh, I get it. I just didn’t think it was funny.  Sorry.”

That’s my queen.  She says she’s my biggest fan, but how can she be my biggest fan when everything I create doesn’t make her melt? I’m sure there are bigger fans.

My work is genius!

And there ya go!  I’ve found my biggest fan and he is me!

I like me. I think everything I create is an overflowing horn of creative plenty.  I wrote a short story about the family cat in second grade: creative gold! I wrote a twenty page essay about the MMPI in college. If you were awake when you reached the last page, you would have been astounded.

So would have I.

Over the years, I’ve dealt with haters and doubters.  Most of them are in the publishing industry.  That does pose a problem if I want others to read my work. I don’t. I am, after all, my biggest fan.

I am a Papier-mâché island crafted on the slick-slime pages of my glory, self-sufficient and self-important.

And like everything I’ve crafted (besides the MMPI report) that’s complete fiction.

Of course I care what others think. And each time I share my work, I craft a bubble of time to consider criticism.

The life of a struggling writer is more than a daily regimen of struggling and writing. It’s about making yourself stronger too. The struggling writer needs to be heroic, because he is both mother and father to his work; stone skinned warrior and nurturing mother, defending and bettering a young fledgling concept to an adult prose, until the time comes when they can stand on their own.

“It’s not funny.”

And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes my written word is a surly man-boy living in my basement, playing D&D and eating Funyuns, never going anywhere. That doesn’t mean that I love it less, but it does mean that sometimes I need to kick the words free.

Tough love is hardest for the writing parent. We always believe in something we could have done to make them better or we only see them for the best we think they are.

I am my biggest fan, but I have to be. I’m also my harshest critic.

I am the two faced Roman god Janus. I am the first person to yell “shit!” and abort my child to nothingness. I am disapproving father living vicariously through my characters; I am the disappointed stage mom complaining about bloated sentence structure and slathering guilt as thick as jelly on all my words for all they could accomplish if they just applied themselves.

That’s what it means to struggle and write. And that’s why we need people around us who are willing to stand outside our heads and give us a real perspective so that we can make our babies brilliant and bright. We need people who care enough to tell us the truth. And we need to take time and consider the value of their criticism.

“It’s not funny.”

I know, but it will be when I’m done with it.