I did something I rarely do the other day…I talked to my wife about my WIP.
And I don’t mean I rarely talk to my wife – I mean I rarely talk about any book I’m writing. Like most writers I can summarize it in one or two pithy comparative sentences (it’s kind of like XXXX, crossed with XXXX – and if you can’t do that, you have a problem on your hands anyway). And I can probably even write a decent query right now if I needed it, but I find it hard to actually “talk” someone through a book I’m writing. I become tongue-tied about the very thing – the world – I’ve been building out of words for months. I end up with a lot of, uhmmm, and then this happens, but I forgot to tell you that it’s important because this other thing happened already two chapters before that… It’s kind of maddening.
I think some of it is just deep familiarity, as well as a certain shyness that something that might sound so awesome in my head might actually sound pretty lame when spoken out loud; but the other part of it is tied to the word I used above: “world.” In many ways, when I write I live in the world I’ve created with these characters – it’s not me and them, it’s us, trapped to together in this little snow globe made of words and ideas. And like most authors, I’m constantly writing and rewriting in my head anyway, even when I’m not sitting down with pen and paper, so I truly never escape it. Talking about it is hard – like Neo trying to understand The Matrix without ever having been outside of it. I always feel at the end of one of these talks I’m left staring goggle-eyed, my hands hanging in the air, repeating see, get it? get it? in a slightly higher pitched voice with every iteration.
Fortunately, my wife has learned how to manage these sorts of little outbursts, and whether she truly “gets it” or not, she always prompts me with just enough questions and says just enough of the right things to get me through it. She then reminds me she asked because she really does want to know, and she always leaves me with a “that sounds really good.”
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. And maybe it’s best if I just tell her to read the damn thing…
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