When Does the Final Draft Actually Appear?

"True genius shudders at incompleteness"--Edgar Allan Poe

Writers: ever written something that you thought was absolutely GENIUS until you saw it again the next day and then hated yourself and were subsequently humiliated by your poor lapse of judgment?

I call that having a one-night-stand with your first draft. It's just ugly.

But what if it's not your first draft, but more like, an entire book? I had a mini-meltdown the other day before emailing my first book, Little Earthquakes, off to a friend to read. I reread almost 70 pages and nearly decided to torch it, blot it out of my memory like a victim of incest. There were only a few redeeming lines in what seemed like endless pages of amateur, uneducated, undisciplined, prose-posing-as-poetry pieces of narcissistic garbage. I emailed them to her but went home that day feeling sad and depleted like a middle-aged actress who has realized that she will not be getting calls to play the ingenue any longer.

I shared this feeling with my spouse and he just shook his head: "But, you won a prize for that book. A PUH-RIZE!" He articulated loud and slow, as though I didn't understand what the word 'prize' meant.

Writers are notorious for this, or really, creative people are notorious for this. The work is never done. The finished product is always as scary as first draft.

I remember reading an article once where Nicole Kidman said it was painful for her to watch herself acting: she was constantly critiquing herself, judging her every move. I thought to myself, this dumb broad, I'd LOVE to be sitting in a theater somewhere in a couture gown watching myself act in some movie where I was paid millions of dollars to play pretend and kiss some hot actor, give-me-a-break! Now I have a lot more sympathy for the botoxed Aussie.I understand her pain completely.

Being creative publicly means willingly placing some part of your body on the chopping block for others to decide whether or not that appendage is worth saving. It's pulling up your sweater for others to see the breast cancer scars and mawed tissue and deciding if it is profound statement of truth or just grotesque. But its a beautiful thing, this truth, this grotesqueness. Writing and creation and carnage and love and first-draft or Pulitzer Prize book, it's all the same. It all has its place and function. So what if people can my writing?

It helps me to remember that I am learning, that I am still new to it all.

I would never judge my daughter for not running after barely learning to walk. I'd tell her to take it slow: steady her gait, plant her heels, try the stairs, master the stroll, running's bad for the joints.

Precision of Language, Please

In the book, The Giver, a utopian society is architectured around community, efficiency, and politeness. Children are chastised for saying "I'm starving!" when what they meant to say is, "I'm hungry." Because of this push for precision, absolutes and extremes of feeling have fallen away from their vernacular almost entirely; so much so that the main character, Jonas, is admonished by his parents for asking "Do you love me?" They look at him, shocked by his foolishness, and bark, "Precision of language, please!" In their world, love is a word without meaning; they are as incapable of feeling love as they are in using the word itself. It is outdated, foreign in their mouths and in their hearts.

Is fiction so different than reality?

The word love has lost its meaning. Not from limitation or underusage--quite the opposite. 'Love' is in our mouths so much that it might as well be the same word for 'dinner' or 'sleep' or 'sock.' We use the same word to describe our feelings for pizza as we do our spouse. I love you. What does that phrase even mean anymore? It means I have an above average response to you. It means I enjoy the way you make me feel. It means I adore the way they have seasoned the crust on this Sicilian style pie.

I say we place a moratorium on the word 'love' for awhile.

The ancient Greeks had a complex, more comprehensive way of expressing love in their language. They understood 4 types of love: storge (affection), eros (erotic; being 'in love'), philia (friendship), and agape (unconditional, God-like love). Certainly these words lack the fluid quality of our English counterpart; 'storge' doesn't roll off the tongue like 'love' does. But if we adopted them into our vernacular, they could possibly enable us to evaluate our feelings with a little more consideration rather than sweeping them under that giant and complicated welcome mat we call love.

Phrases That Make Me Cringe

At the risk of sounding like a total elitist language-Nazi wench, my face erupts in a series of ticks when people use certain phrases. It's not that I'm judging them (well, maybe a little). It's more like my actual nerve endings reject a certain brand of ignoramus. I'd love to say that I had a neatly compacted 'Top Ten' list, but for now I submit the 'Top Seven' that are nagging me this week.


1. "We're pregnant"--No, actually, SHE's pregnant. Is HE also downing prenatal vitamins like candy, hovering over a toilet every thirty minutes, and experiencing a strange darkening of the areolas? No? Then "WE" are not pregnant. I can accept "We're expecting" on a technicality, but even that makes me wince just a little.

2. "Going green"--Let me clarify by saying that this phrase only makes me cringe in advertising. Just because you are a store that is now offering to sell me a crappy reusable bag that I will inevitably forget to bring during my next shopping experience does NOT make you an environmentally friendly company. I am not fooled; but thanks for the new lunch bag anyway.

3. "You people"--It's the favorite phrase of bigots everywhere for a reason. Fury-inducing cringe-worthiness.

4. "I hate to bother you, but..."--Remember that song from School House Rock, "Conjunction, junction, what's your function?" Well in this case, the conjunction 'but' is meant to describe its speaker. As in, you ARE one by using this disingenuous phrase to feel less guilty about bothering me.

5. "Can I ask you a question?"--This is the epitome of backward-logic-falsely-polite-I'm-too-insecure-to-just-spit-it-out-waste-of-a-phrase. You need to ask me permission to ask me a question? Oh, the irony. That level of self-doubt could cause a head injury.

6. "Parking in rear"--Do I even need to say anything about this one? Your inner middle-schooler should take care of this nicely.

7. "She/he's my boo!"--Excuse me, what? She's your boo? Are you scared of her or something?

What's on your cringe list?