When I first learned that as a writer I would be forced like Medea to kill my children, I opened up an orphanage. OK, maybe it wasn’t that simple. At first, well, for many years actually, I was adamant about holding onto the little buggers no matter what. We all have those sentences and paragraphs we just adore, that we’ve tinkered with and fiddled on ad infinitum or nauseam, your choice, and that we know have absolutely no business showing up in our stories as they do. They are like an unexpected pregnancy you just can’t deal with right now, but perverse as are their intentions, they are still fundamentally sound and possibly usable somewhere at a later date, just not now. They are yours regardless of their poor timing, and so you love them, adverbs and all, and keep them ‘til a better time. Now that I am better at self editing, I excise them and suspend their animation in my Cryogenics file. I used to call the file Dead Babies, but renamed it after I’d had five miscarriages and terminated a second trimester Down Syndrome pregnancy, and the words became too loaded.
The sentence below is old enough to vote, fight in Afghanistan, and drink alcohol. A middle child, younger than my daughter, Julia, and older than my son, Christopher, I’ve just taken it out to examine as a curiosity, like a wedding dress bought for a marriage that never took place. I once was very proud of it, bordering on hubris, spent endless hours crafting it, but now it makes me wince. After having relocated it to other pieces several times, I amputated, and it has inhabited Dead Babies and now Cryogenics for years. Jejune and overwrought, I saved it knowing it would come in handy one day, and now it has. It is posted here as an example of maybe not quite purple, but certainly lavender, prose.
I've been working on a sentence all day, and now I nearly have it. Oh, just a few more minutes alone! This morning when I woke, the little fragment was quickening in my brain, the crumb of a dream. I massaged it while I shampooed my hair, energized it in the hot rush of shower, untangled it with conditioner as I tamed my wild curls. For hours I turned it around, tweaking and prodding it, feeling it change, irresistible as a loose tooth to the tongue of a child. Oysters must feel like this, rolling that grain of sand around, coating it, smoothing it once and again with nacreous goo until, at long last, it emerges: a fully-formed pearl. Not that my words are pearls: the analogy is in the process, not the product.
The intention is good, the overall metaphor not bad, and some phrases “crumb of a dream,” “irresistible as a loose tooth,” and “nacreous goo” still have a certain appeal. It’s so difficult to disengage yourself, to push yourself away from your creation and evaluate with a disinterested eye. Both of my children are smart and physically attractive, about which I am not even slightly embarrassed about being glad, but I have friends who are not as fortunate. They have children who are neither as smart, nor as good looking, nor as charming as mine. Some kids are just stinkers, and others cannot be called cute by any standards, and yet, against all odds, their parents love them. But they often try to make us like them, too, and there I draw the line. I am not fond of other people’s children, sometimes don’t even like my own, and suspect the sentiment is far more widespread than admitted to. So it is with writing.
