My critique partner is an awful good sport. She's tough and patient and knows how to handle me when I'm nearly unhandleable. She also indulges my wackadoo ideas of writerly fun.
I suggested an evening where we take turns reading aloud from a piece of our early work. I mean early, early. Stuff we wrote when we were so green that if we were stuck in the ground we'd grow.
Remember that stage? When you just wrote and wrote and wrote, careening along with no thought to the danger skulking all around you. The jabberwock of telling, the screaming cliché banshee, the morlock holes of thin characterization, adverbs breeding like wererabbits, and the angry unicorn of author intrusion.
I thought sharing our worst writing would be good for a giggle, and thanks to our good friend Twobottles O. Redwine, it was a scream.
My partner read first, an excerpt from a spooky short. I was dismayed to find that aside from an ambiguous point of view, and a moment of oddly placed hyperbole, her story wasn't awful. What the heck, man? This was not what I signed up for, but we had a deal. So I read an excerpt from a romantic comedy novel that I'd exhumed for the occasion.
I won't bore you with the specifics of how and why my story was so dreadful. I will say that if the occurrence of adverbs could be turned into a drinking game, I would have been hospitalized.
Overall there were laughs a plenty. Hysterics, even. I might have inhaled a morsel of brie. But in spite of the silliness, I'm going to level with y'all and admit it was genuinely embarrassing.
It's weird to be mortified by the quality of your first 'serious' writing project. After all, wouldn't it be more alarming to pick up something you wrote as a newb and be as proud of it now as you were then? Being semi-horrified is a sign you've embraced the learn and grow, which is good. I was still embarrassed though, and that's not all. Stay with me.
I'm having a feel...
The last thing I expected was to be jealous of my novice self. She was a terrible writer with delusions of Salinger. Yet I miss her fearlessness and excitement. I miss the wild creative lightning that inured her to the terror I experience now that I'm aware of what lurks in the literary shadows. Bitey jaws. Catchy claws.
Writing is dangerous, but it's also a thrilling adventure. I think I've lost sight of that a little bit.
I challenge you to go back and read those first stories/poems/plays. It's humbling and hilarious. It's a reminder that as you venture into the darkened wood, you don't necessarily have to slay the jabberwocky, sometimes you only need to believe you can outrun him.
