Stop Posting Your WIPS on Social Media
And Start Killing Them
Part I | Murder Most Foul
I killed my book last year.
Murdered, throat slit, out, out damn spot! It gurgled briefly, eyes milky flooded with bone-sharp pain, the type that makes your tongue fat and too big for your mouth. It slid down the wall, blood mingling with salt water. Its gills flared, shallow breaths on the deck of the ship as we lurched further into the unknown. I gutted it, descaled it, cut up the flesh. Entrails to the bin, carcass overboard, hosed down the deck. Then I rendered the fat and lit my tallow candle, rolled out the map in a cloud of dust and began to plot my course anew.
Forgive such a macabre extended metaphor (I do have a penchant for them) but how else should I treat my work? Sentimentality is the death of improvement and this is not the first time I’ve killed a story.
This particular story came to me in the shower when I was 13. It hit me like a thunderclap, the shower became the roar of a tempest and I was whipped by an idea so powerful that I felt the razor blade slice my leg, watched the blood trickle down the drain. The story was very different then, and I wrote it for four years, my parents dutifully reading every chapter on my school-issued laptop until I went to uni and I changed irrevocably. My politics, my art, my thoughts, my beliefs – and so I scrapped it. I ripped enough flesh away from the bones but the sinew was still there like strips of ragged cloth fluttering in the wind. And in the shadow of a cracked rib cage, I started again.
This version was different, bigger scale, based on international political theory, and laws, the magic was patchy but that didn’t matter so much. New characters, same villains. New me, same me and I was at it for hours, took it with me overseas, sat up with my roommate drinking bottles of pastis until we were bourrées (shitfaced). Then after sharing a bed with it for a year I came back home and the story slunk away from me. I was too focused on other things: a new job, a lockdown, a breakup, and then in the deafening silence came the heavy breathing of mens rea, the ticking pocket watch of a guilty soul before they commit homicide.
Or should I call it livreicide?
The end of 2020 saw the whole thing scrapped. No shadow of a femur to work under, this was the glaring sun of my curiosity, laser gaze burning the ground. I told my partner (then dutifully attentive friend) about it all, knees tucked under my chin on the curbside at Disney Studios. I explained how my conlang had evolved over twelve years, how the society functioned, how the villains had changed, the magic as dangerous as battery acid. He listened attentively, I was sure this was the one.
News flash: it wasn’t.
But here’s the thing. This entire process was private. The autopsies, the coroner’s report - the headlines were silent. I didn’t post my ideas to Instagram or Tik Tok, I never released chapters. You might guess where I’m going with this but before you get your knickers in a twist, I’m not shaming anyone who does post their work in such an infantile, vulnerable stage. This is the lot of the YA fantasy writer, usually unpublished, usually young. I see nothing wrong with promoting your work or releasing your baby to the world (what the hell am I doing here?). But a fundamental part of the writing process is the privacy of a thousand deaths and I worry that many young writers miss the beauty (and the pain) that comes from parting ways with your work, a blood-stained kiss, promising you’ll find each other again.
Part II | The Atrophy of Martyrdom and the Liberation of Death
Dr Michael Mohammed Ahmad, author of The Lebs, wrote a fantastic article for Sydney Review of Books called Bad Writer. In it, he talks about new writers’ inability to seek out criticism, to absorb and alchemise it. So many of us are interested in the pat on the back, the mint-sweet ego breath as it whispers in your ear, “You’re amazing.”
Just like I learned in boxing, I tell them that if they want to be great writers, they need a qualified trainer, what we call in the industry an editor, someone who is watching them from the outside and keeping an eye on their form, technique, development of characters, settings, details, and voice, someone who is providing them with critical feedback on an ongoing basis. It is often difficult for me as an editor to convince bad writers that this is a healthy and normal part of the business, which should be accepted without taking personal offence.1
Like many of these young writers, I had created maps, and fan art (it was on Doll Divine ok don’t judge me), I had used Art Breeder to morph my generic little characters into their generic little faces. I had chapters upon chapters, spreadsheets unpacking my conlang, pages upon pages breaking down my magic system. I desperately wanted to share it. I wanted to launch these characters into the stratosphere, share my shitty (I mean witty) dialogue.
But then I grew up.
Or read a new book.
Or understood a new theory.
And then everything changed again.
I think in part the underlying cause behind this is a sort of business-like neoliberal approach to sharing our fledgling work. We ‘launch’ characters like we do a product. We ‘introduce’ a new fantasy world (i.e. product line). We share snippets of our prose like its copywriting. And my biggest concern is that we die so young as martyrs, we die for the cause that is our “great work” (at the time). We are convinced that ‘this is it, this is the story I was meant to tell.’ Our icon is hung up in the church as cloaked priests amble past with their censors of frankincense and myrrh. In the dying light pilgrims pray to a fixed image of our story, our idea, our characters, and our narrative voice. We are the blessed martyr who was burned at the stake too young, forever immortalised in the Kingdom above. We die as the maiden, never the crone. And I think that speaks to a certain obsession with meritocracy, success, and capitalism whereby our own fruits should be borne now and never later.
This side of death, the one transfixed by preservation, the one drunk on the scent of formaldehyde, embalms us. It makes sure our ability petrifies; we’re pickled, granules of sugar eaten away slowly by the rancid smell of vinegar. But delaying the process of death, the inevitable, only prolongs our path to growth. And rebirth is the greatest gift we can give ourselves as artists, so long as we’re brave enough to see it through from one side to the other.
Next I tell them they need the right diet, not necessarily what they put into their bodies (though I often think a lot of these bad writers need to cut back on the snacks and alcohol and do some sit-ups and push-ups), but what they are putting into their minds: what are they reading, watching and listening to? Here’s a scale I use to measure the quality of a writer’s diet: Fifty Shades of Grey is KFC and The Swan Book is the vegetables you grow in your backyard.2
The above is not meant to shame. My concern is not meant to nag. For fuck’s sake I have to admit that YA het-fantasy with high-fae princes got me back into reading after a four-year-uni-driven dry spell. But I have evolved light years as a writer since moving away from these worlds, purely from being a sponge. My vocabulary increased as I sucked on the bones of books and then moved on to the marrow. I ate the liver and the tripe, my fingers buried in the intestines and I licked each finger clean. And then I did a Masters of Creative Writing and I unlocked the power of something so profound, that I knew that this, this was it, the third-person singular pronoun of my dreams.
The power of the edit.
And I don’t mean a self-edit. I mean the same edit that Mohammed is talking about: the peer review, the group surgery, the masterclass in the morgue and your work is the cadaver. It allowed me to kill my darlings, prune and preen all the crap that clotted on the page, that clung desperately to each line. Editing allowed me to strip the unnecessary to reveal the soul. The edit was a scalpel, the work my sternum, and I joyfully accepted the forceps and prised my own chest open to reveal my own narrative voice (the one you’re reading now). I didn’t have a narrative voice ten years ago. I didn’t even have one five years ago. But through the constant ego deaths and diligent murders, I have arrived at the beginning of the path and I have the luxury of taking the road less travelled.
Part III | A Lesson in Bereavement
Grief is a natural and normal part of this process. I killed that book last week and I cried for days. I cried to my mum and my sibling, to my partner, to a picture of my dog (I imagine she’s speaking sweet words to me of furry comfort). I felt angry, cheated, and exhausted. Why had I spent so much time? Why hadn’t I cherished it enough? Why hadn’t it been good enough? I wrapped myself in shawls of obsidian, heavy threads of charcoal and onyx and I reached my hand forward tentatively in the morgue, pulled back the white sheets to see my character’s bloodless faces.
But they were peaceful. They had been put to rest.
I fundamentally believe in their resurrection, their phoenix-like power to rise again from the ashes. I think it would be remiss of me to say that their death is permanent. It is simply a necessary part of their transformation, their revolution, much like my own. It makes me feel so painfully alive, it threatens to overwhelm me – but it never does.
I want this profound experience for young writers. I want them to murder, maim, burn, plant, grow, to undergo metamorphosis. I want to cocoon them in the nest and shelter them from prying eyes as their harsh caws transform into beautiful birdsong. I believe in these young writers, they are the weavers of magic, the storytellers of the future. But our obsession with being seen, with launching, with posting, with the public sphere, with the snake oil salesman pitch of success at our most pivotally sensitive age robs them of the most important process.
I want to tell them that I’ve sat with these uncomfortable feelings like ex-lovers over a coffee after years apart. I want to tell them that the intensity of the grief abates. That I unabashedly wept, gnashed my teeth, beat my breast, and still the storm passed, the bow of the boat shot upwards over calmer waves as I traverse darker, deeper waters, peering curiously over the side. We bob over the trench of my soul. The water is not warm here, it is not shallow. It is cold and unknown. The pressure is enough to kill me and yet I strap on my wetsuit and climb down the metal rungs, adjust my mask and my oxygen tank before I duck my head underwater and swim slowly down.
It takes years, an age, millennia, but I’m okay taking my time. My body hardens then loosens, the pressure reforming me again and again like clay. I am whale fall, and the creatures of this place feed on me; first the big ones, the ones you know about. And then as we sink lower, the others arrive, the unknown things, constellations of invertebrates like naphtha lamps illuminating what once was, and what yet may be.
And as Sylvia Plath once wrote,
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.3
Sydney Review of Books. 2016. Bad Writer by Michael Mohammed Ahmad. [online] Available at: <https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/bad-writer/>
ibid.
Poetryfoundation.org. 2015. Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath : The Poetry Foundation. [online] Available at: <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178961>
Image: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Marat#/media/File:Death_of_Marat_by_David.jpg>
Just profoundly beautiful Yaz. I can’t wait to see your book on the shelves.
Whew!! 💕💕💕 or perhaps 💞💘💔💓💖