“Pieces of Bennet” by Shelly Owens was published in NAR issue 301.4.
I think my writer brain might be toast. I’m a sunburnt snake swimming in my own crackly skin trying to shed myself of myself. Or maybe it’s like Miss Havisham’s house: cluttered with moldy old cake and all the stuff I’ve wanted to get down on the page but haven’t. I’m a sickly sweetmeat of all the things you’ll never eat, but that’s probably just a weird way of saying I’m full of it. Excuses. Metaphors. Slightly uncomfortable phrases.
I wish I could say that I’m one of those good writers who writes every day no matter how few words, but the truth is that I have to make time to get a bunch done in short spurts. Those are the weeks when I blow off overtime at work and hunker down at home. I think of odd things to write about, like a dwarf priest who botches an exorcism and complications ensue, or I think of normal things to make odd, like a woman who bakes bread loaves that sing. In this, the second paragraph of my blog post, perhaps it is obvious that this is one of my “off” weeks, but hopefully not overly obvious, because standards are important.
So my standards during a writing week? If I were a perfectionist, I’d be a much better writer, so I’ll settle on meticulous. I read my sentence or paragraph aloud over and over again until I’m happy with it and then build on that. And then I read it all from the beginning again and revise a few times. And add more. And then do it again. The sounds of the words themselves need to please me as much as the meaning of the words. You’re probably thinking that that’s a very repetitive process that doesn’t always feel like progress, and I would not disagree with that. The process also burns me out (hence Havisham-toast-brain). I had to lock away my cannibalism story for a bit because I’d read it through too many times, not only burning myself out on it but giving myself nightmares. One day, soon, instead of a sunburnt snake, my brain will be a phoenix and crawl out of the ashes and dust to start on it again. Until then, I’m reading lots and thinking about vegetarian foods.