Denial

"You need to stop denying you're a writer," she said as she stood in my doorway.

Part of my mind considered her somewhat of a bitch. She always did this, opened my door, stood there until I acknowledged her presence, then made some kind of important announcement to let me know why she was there. The bad news was I needed her. She could scan a ten-page story in as many minutes and let me know what was wrong with it.

Editors…you can’t live with them, and you can’t fit them into a blender.

"I don't even know what you are doing here. What are you doing here, anyway? I told you I wanted to be left alone. I said I needed a month. A month of being alone to see where this goes. And you know better than I what interruptions do to a writer."

Perfect timing for dramatic running of fingers through my hair. "I keep telling you that, and you keep showing up. How can I explain it to you better so you might understand? I just want to be left alone."

She walked in, sat down in the dining room chair next to me. Her hand rubbed my back.

"You're gonna have to start editing this shit at some point. You're a writer. You produce. I've known a lot of writers, but they never produce much. They just choose to deny they're a writer and keep vomiting words onto paper without ever having an editor look at it. Some kind of artistic creation that is untouchable to anyone else. You write well. I enjoy reading your raw work. You just need to either edit it yourself or have someone help you."

"I don't edit my own work. It ends up on the paper the way it was meant to be. No one else has to read it, I write for me."

She pulled away, shifted her body in the chair. Put her hands in her lap, for some reason.

"You produce. You are a writer. You write for yourself, but there is someone somewhere who will love what you wrote. You have to decide, are you going to write just for yourself, or are you writing for them? Every writer secretly wants someone else to read the work. They just don't know it. Yet. And your first drafts are always crap. You miss punctuation, you don’t always tie your story together, sometimes you write something that belongs in two different stories. So that…is…what…I…do. I just clean up your mess, but it is always still your story."

I leaned back, away from the computer. "You know, Stephen King wrote The Stand when he was coked up and an alcoholic. That was over fifteen hundred pages. You know how many words are on a page? This stuff takes time. It takes more time than I expected. So I plug away. But I keep my door closed. It's just me and my work. Maybe some day I will share it with the world. But until then, I sit here all alone and type out words. Monkeys can do what I do. I can type one thousand words an hour, a short story is five thousand words, a novel is one hundred thousand words…that’s five hours for a short story, and one hundred hours for a novel. Not counting half the shit goes into the fire, which means you have to almost double the amount of time to write a simple story. Then you have an editor ruin it. Then you do re-writes. Then you learn something new and change your original story because the first one didn’t make sense. Then you give it back to your editor. Then more re-writes. Unless you’re ok giving the reader crap."

She sat there, elbow on table, head in hand, staring as though I was telling her something she already knew. When I was done…

"You don’t write simple stories, and that is as far as any comparison between you and Stephen King goes. Stephen King wrote a hundred books or more, in all different states of mind, and he's not who you need to compare yourself to. Don't ever compare yourself to any other author. You write what you write. If you were a history professor writing a book on the Civil War, you wouldn't write it in the style of King. And even if you were writing a horror novel, you still wouldn't write it in the style of King. He's got his own gig, and you have yours. If you spend all your time wondering if you're going to sell as many books as Stephen King has, that's just another second you're not spending writing your own words. And trust me, once you do your rewrites, your words will be great. Trust me."

I wasn't in the mood to argue. I leaned forward against the keyboard once again. "Thank you, again. For stopping by. I truly appreciate your concern. I'll let you know when I'm ready to see you again. I might have something for you."

She scooted back her chair and stood up. She hadn't even removed her coat, she never intended to stay long. Maybe she just wanted to stop by and chew my ass out for not being a better writer and not giving her something. Maybe it was a "mom moment" where she came by to make sure I was doing my homework. Or a “coaching moment” for a writer trying to put something down that meant something.

I didn't care. I just wanted her to leave.

She stopped at the door, opened it, and turned, "Stop denying that you are a writer. Once you figure that out, you will understand."

The door closed. I was left with my dog and my computer. Time to write again.