More than Writers

Photo: Laura Ritchie, "After the Edit," Flickr As writers, we pour out our hearts onto the page. We open a vein and bleed as we put ourselves out there for criticism. We wonder why oh why do we do this; why couldn’t we work in a bank or maybe get a job in marketing? But we can’t not write. We have to; it’s part of who we are and what we do. It’s how we share what we know. How we are known. As we’re working on the big projects – usually a book – we often hit a wall in our writing. Perhaps it’s as with a marathon and it’s the twentieth mile. We’ve done our %^$^% first draft and wait for comments from our editor/agent/reviewers. We open the email and take a deep breath, quickly scanning for anything positive to shore up our energy in order to face the criticism. For at this point our book-baby feels so embryonic and tiny; we’re not sure if it can take the criticism, or if we will be tempted to abort. With the goal in mind – the birth one day of this project – we hun...

I sighed as my son sat in front of me sobbing. It was an all too-familiar scenario. He was practising his drum homework for the first time since a long break in the summer holidays and he couldn’t play it immediately so fell apart. The anger, frustration and sadness that emanated from him were the same as I experience regularly with his sister. Having played the piano for a couple of years, she has soared through her first exam. And yet, even though she knows the drill by now, those first few days with a new piece are full of the same angst. She, in particular, is a perfectionist and finds it immensely irritating if she can’t achieve something straight away. So having to learn and practise pieces is good for her – and difficult for me… As my son was in full-on meltdown in front of me my heart sank. I remember saying in my head: ‘please Lord not another one whose perfectionism will have to be dealt with day by day’. But then I started thinking about the perfectionist streak insi...

Photo: Nic McPhee, flickr At Friday, 5pm, I met my deadline. Having pressed “send” to my dozen reader reviewers with my manuscript, I was pleased to finish the first draft. I’d done a fair bit of rewriting on the manuscript already, passing my chapters, one by one, to my publisher for comment and critique. He unearthed hidden agendas that needed axing and quirky ways of stating things that needed rephrasing. Surely, I thought, the worst of the rewriting was over. On Saturday at 3pm, I spotted an email from one of the reviewers. As I opened it I glimpsed her warning for me to “buckle up,” for she said she didn’t take a measured, British approach in her critiques but would be straight with me – yet she thought my baby was beautiful and wanted it to fly. I skim-read her thirteen pages of comments, the anxiety building in my gut, and took myself to bed. And yet from under the duvet, EditorAmy knew that WriterAmy was merely suffering a typical first-time-author emotional reac...