When you’re a writer, your work becomes your young and you have to go through the parenting cycle. A story starts out as a sentence, which you begin dressing up with all its special clothing. I always start with a diaper, because I need something to catch all the poo that issues from a first draft.
One has to feed a writing project with all the proper verbs, nouns and sentence structure. Of course you’d like to take your child out in a stroller or carrier, but this baby is a solo project; if you show off a work in progress, your family will love it even if it is full of poo, and your friends will be afraid to tell you it’s homely because they feel it will develop as it ages. In this case, they’re probably right.
If the story starts to talk, it’s gibberish at first, but once you’re past terrible page two it starts refusing things you want it to do and makes demands. Your stream of consciousness at three in the morning reads like a temper tantrum by the time you get around to reading it at noon the next day.
You give it a physical with spell check, even though it’s a pediatrician no parent really trusts. You innoculate it with anti-virus or protect it with a cloud as it grows, matures, rebels, and drives you batty. Finally, you sit and take a look at your child and wonder if it is really what you started out to do. You try to buy what you think are nicer clothes for it, dressing it up in prosy description or pleading to just let you cut a little off the top.
Finally it’s ready to go out on its own. The last words are spoken and you put a period at the end. It may not get married or get a degree, but it will let you know how it is doing once in awhile when it gets noticed and does well enough to send some money home. Unless you’re writing an expose’ and then you get sent all its dirty laundry.
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