This post by Heidi Cullinan originally appeared on her The Amazon Iowan blog on 1/15/15.
“My book is my baby.” You hear that a lot from authors, especially of novels, and as one of that number, I get it. Most of us don’t mean it more than a very loose metaphor, an image-intense description of what it’s like to create something out of almost nothing and have it become something much more. We imprint hopes and dreams on this creation, and we feel great affection for it. Ergo, baby.
While I won’t try to stop anyone else who insists on calling their books their babies, because it’s still a free country, etc, I am not one of those people. And because I just read something about books being babies that kind of made my eye twitch, I feel like clarifying why I am, in this particular instance, anti-baby.
When I write a story, there’s definitely a big stage where the thing is unformed, but it’s not an infant I’m teaching to walk or hold its head upright. I’m trying to find eyeballs and get rid of that weird third ear on top of its head. It’s clay, not flesh. Absolutely I talk to it and nurture it, but I also rip it apart, and kick it, and yell at it—if my books were my babies, they’d all be taken away by child protective services.
But even if I were to pretend that was all somehow okay baby-tending behavior, what I do next is even worse. I guess I could go with the editing and proofing and beta-reading as sending the kid to school, but…holy hell, I’m not letting it learn. I’m forcing it into a mold, making it acceptable to society in a way which, again, would probably get me arrested if I tried it with my actual flesh and blood child.
Read the full post on The Amazon Iowan.