Being My Own Nemesis

Yesterday, my wife came home and handed me a manuscript. I asked her where it came from and she told me that the author was a relative of one of her clients who thought that either she or I should give it a once over to tell him what we thought. Since this was the first manuscript I had seen besides my own, and I had been given the green light to tear it a new butt hole, I was really excited. I started on it immediately.

The first thing I noticed about the manuscript was it was bound like a spiral note book. However, when I considered this was a copy given to a family member I though there was no need to ding him on it because it was given as a gift, not to impress an editor or agent. The next thing I noticed was the entire manuscript was single spaced. I usually don’t get bothered by things like that, but I think because it was a fiction novel written by another unpublished aspiring author, and I was asked to give an honest critique, I am honor bound to take it seriously, more serious than my own work. I finally started reading it and immediately had all kinds of bells going off in my head for both the good and the not-so-good aspects of his writing. Once I realized how seriously I was taking this young man’s work, I realized what was missing from my own writing process; brutally honest criticism.

I need to become my own worse critic, my own nemesis. I do look over what I’ve written currently, but not in the same way I looked at that manuscript. I was critical of any and every little thing from the obvious spelling and grammar errors to the nitpicky things such as sentence structure, word choice, use of foreshadowing, and parallelism. With my own writing, I am lucky enough to have a wife that is a walking grammar and spelling checker, but because she is not a big fan of fiction, and because of the relationship that exists there, I’m sure that she is not as hard on me as she should be. Having access to a live-in editor was fine when I was flitting around from idea to idea and not genuinely ready to make the leap to being published, but at this stage I really need to do it for myself. I need to be willing to tear out my own heart, look at it, throw it up in to the air, hit it with a baseball bat, catch it, throw it to the ground, stomp on it a few times, dust it off, make the necessary alterations, and then shove it back where it belongs and see if all of that makes it work better now.

Batter Up! Let the heart ripping begin!