more writing days

I've been a melancholy failed writer for a number of years. My once shining literary potential was reduced to a pitiful wreckage of thwarted hopes; a cautionary tale for women who allow themselves to become tragically/happily sidetracked by traditional domestic roles.

O! My writing career!

Such feminist critique is out of favor these days, I know. But as bright young educated women find themselves spending year after year home with the kids, and putting off their hopes and dreams--yes, even if you love the little darlings with all-your-heart as I do!--eventually, they may come to a bittersweet epiphany. Yes, you are a lucky, lucky girl to be a mom, and maybe even to stay home with your babies, instead of working and having to put them into the indifferent auspices of daycare.

But still, what of your hopes and dreams? What of your brain, and its perhaps hard earned education?

It is still there, wanting to be acknowledged, under all the fuss and furor of daily domestic routine.

The pendulum is bound to swing in the other direction, and feminism will come roaring back. This I predict.

Anyway, I digress. Which is a sort of motto for me.

But for reasons I have yet to pin down, I've been churning out the pages these days. I'm on the penultimate draft of my novel manuscript--yes, the one I've been working on for decades. I call it penultimate, as I will give out copies to select readers for proofreading and continuity checking and the like, before I give it a final good polish and start shopping it around.

However, I won't be asking for the fatal criticism which goes like this: it's good, except I'd make the heroine a boy, and instead of setting it in New Jersey it should take place in Timbuktu, and instead of the setting of the 1800s make it the 1500s, and all the downstairs furniture should be moved upstairs, and all the upstairs furniture should be moved downstairs, and the tree in the front yard should be in the back yard, and why don't you just scrap the whole project and start over again?

Whatever do you mean--revise?

I won't be asking for that kind of criticism.

I got gobs of that in graduate writing workshops. I had a whale of a good time in graduate school, but the workshops were a mixed bag. There were pros and cons. I do feel that I learned so much; that it accelerated my writerly education, and learned to recognize common mistakes in my work as well as my fellow students'.

Some of the criticism was very valuable. I would often hear a 'ding' when I received something thoughtful and applicable to my artistic vision.

Some of it was completely stupid. You'd often come across students who were unable to disengage from their own writing vision. They were really not able, or even interested in speaking to other students' manuscripts. Their criticism amounted to a vain attempt to remodel your story into something they themselves would write. They were most unhelpful in helping you along on your artistic journey.

Then there were the condescending types, who would tell you about a typo on page seven and just give you pitying looks. 'You, a writer?' their looks seemed to sneer.

I usually allowed negative criticism a while to settle. If it still bothered me in six months, I would examine it more thoughtfully. That meant sometimes that something useful was there. If I had recovered from the blow, but now was laughing at how absurd the comments were, I would feel happily free to forget them.

Anyway, those days were long ago. I don't know about my fellow students in my graduate writing program. Are they still writing as I am? Some have published. When I was working at Barnes & Noble a few years ago shelving a new shipment of books, my heart fluttered painfully to see the name of a fellow student. Yes, I admit pain, not joy. Jealousy. But most of them, I have the sinking suspicion, have ceased to write. I believe the AWP data on MFA graduates confirms this.

Not me. I'm still plugging away. I'm still rolling the boulder uphill, as Sisyphus. And I can happily report that lately the chapters are just piling up.

With luck, I'll make my deadline of January 1st, complete my goal and get this feckin' monkey off my back.

I will keep you posted.