The Mind Killer
An Article for People Who Care Too Much
Today I am thinking about what it means to refer to one’s creative work as one’s “baby.” I see a lot of people do this, including people who have actual children. This conflicts with reports I’ve heard that some parents of actual children get offended when non–parents of actual children refer to things that are not children as children, for instance, dogs. I sometimes refer to my dog as a baby but I’m well aware that she is not, in fact, a baby. She is better than a baby in every way. This is why I have her instead of a baby.
A common refrain I hear from beginning and early career writers is that their manuscript is “their baby.” The implication is that their creative work is something they care about a great deal. This is a fine way to feel about something you have put a lot of work and a lot of yourself into. This is a normal way to feel: You care about your manuscript a lot; you feel protective of it; and you are proud of it.
Then I see this metaphor carried further. Among the things these folks reassure each other they will never do, no matter how much an agent or editor or publisher pressures them:
Change the title
Use a different pen name for authorship
Make changes to the plot
Make changes at all
This is your baby, after all, and nobody can tell you a thing about it.
I guess this tracks with what I’ve observed about people who have actual babies. Some people have a baby and they think:
This is my child, and now that it is in the world my job is to raise it into the best individual it can be. In this endeavor I will have the help of teachers, pediatricians, soccer coaches, extended family, and so on. But this remains my child and when they reach their full potential I will be proud of them.
And then there are people who have a baby and their mindset is:
This is my child. I made it myself and it’s perfect how it is. I perceive comments about or attempts to help my child improve in any way as personal attacks. Why would you need to give my perfect child a vaccine? Or ask them to behave at school? Don’t be ridiculous. This is my child and no one gets a say but me.
No spoilers but one of these methods results in a productive member of society and one of them results in a Brock Turner.
I posit, then, that if you see your manuscript as your baby, you must decide what that means to you. Does that mean any criticism of that manuscript is an attack on you personally? Or does that mean you are open to the help of others in making that manuscript all it can be?
The professional writers I know, meaning, the people who get paid cash money regularly in exchange for stuff they have written, or the people who publish writing as part of their career work, don’t typically have this issue. I suspect it is because they don’t hang on to one piece of writing they’ve been tinkering with for umpteen years getting more and more invested in it. They write something and then it’s out the door and they’re writing something else.
If you are a writer with a manuscript that you consider your baby, and that is working well for you, then this article is not for you. There’s almost never a good enough reason to change something that’s working well for you. On the other hand, this article is for you if you have a manuscript you call your baby and any of the following are true:
You can’t finish it
You can’t start it
It’s preventing you from working on anything else
You’re struggling with reactions to it
Maybe the problem isn’t that you just care too much about this project.
Dune is having its regularly scheduled resurgence into popular culture right now so people are doing the thing where they quote the Litany Against Fear like it’s deep and meaningful. Dune is always terrible. I don’t have to watch it to know they didn’t put enough Zendaya in to make it not terrible. The Timothée-Chalamet-to-Zendaya ratio is frankly unfortunate. There’s a not-insignificant subset of people who are unfamiliar with Dune generally and are Zendaya fans and they are not happy about how little Zendaya there was in this movie and I’m like . . . if you think you’re disappointed in the substance of this character now just wait.
Honestly I don’t know what it is about man-driven space operas and these pompous sound bytes about fear. Something for me to think about more some other time.
Ignoring fear does not lead to total obliteration and fear is not conquered by sticking your hand in the magical Bene Gesserit pain box while you stare down the queen of the jujutsu space nuns. This is exactly the manly interpretation of fear that has everybody confused about what fear means and what role it plays in human lives. What will you do if you’re hiking at the North Pole and you encounter a polar bear? Will you freeze in fear or will you know how to save your own life?
Okay. Yes, that is a scary example of a situation in which a person would feel fear. By all means, let’s make sure we’re prepared for the fear we might feel when we are flying our tie fighter at 50 million miles per hour through space at the Death Star and we have a split second to save the galaxy. Let’s make sure we are ready for the zombie apocalypse. You know, just in case.
That type of fear is not the one most of us are dealing with in our real lives all the time. This is the fear we read about in fiction and muse about how we would handle if we were the one in the crisis. We do this musing to distract us from our real, actual fears that we are ignoring, like our fear of having a manuscript critiqued or rejected or our fear of facing the reality that sometimes something you worked hard on is never going to yield the success you imagined for it. Like, that’s the actual scary thing. It’s so scary that we don’t even think about it. We distract ourselves with imaginary dramatic scenarios and tell ourselves that’s real fear.
This fear does not bring total obliteration; this fear tricks you into thinking you’re not afraid at all, you’re just experiencing some other obstacle to your goals. You’re not scared, you’re just a procrastinator. You’re just really busy—you know how it is, everybody’s busier than everybody else. You’re just a perfectionist. You’re just not ready to put on the finishing touches.
A lot of people who get caught up working one manuscript to death for years on end are afraid of one of these things:
They will not do justice to the idea they have in their mind.
They will complete the manuscript and readers will find fault with it.
They will exhaust this one idea and have nothing to write afterward.
As long as you don’t type “the end” at the bottom of that manuscript, you never have to face any of those fears. You can just keep tinkering away at this one thing for the rest of your life and never have to deal with any of those scary realities.
Look, I can address these. First, you’re not going to do justice to the idea in your mind. The only way to get good enough at writing to sit down and execute perfectly on a complicated and nuanced idea is to practice a lot by doing that kind of execution on many other manuscripts first. You can only get good at that kind of execution by doing it, over and over again. You can’t get good at that kind of execution by thinking about how much you want to be good at it.
Readers will find fault with your manuscript. That’s just how it’s going to be. There are going to be rejections, requests for rewrites, unsugarcoated feedback, criticism, and terrible Amazon reviews. All published writing gets these. It doesn’t matter if the writing is bad or good. It doesn’t matter if you were afraid of it happening or not. Published work gets unfavorable reactions. No matter how many people like something or how critically acclaimed something is, there will be people who hate it. Like how I hate Dune and Star Wars.
You will not exhaust your well of ideas and have nothing further to write. Ideas are cheap and easy to come by. There are always more idea people than there are execution people because coming up with ideas is the part that’s so easy literally anyone can do it. It takes no skill to come up with ideas for stuff to write. There can be a little mental discipline involved in forcing your brain to do it on a schedule, but that’s it.
The skill you need to build up around ideas is not how to come up with them but how to assess whether they have legs or not before you put time and effort into executing on them. This is a skill you build as you develop ideas and execute on them. This is a skill you do not build hovering over the same idea for years on end.
A neat thing about the truth is it remains true whether you are afraid of it or not. Here is another scary truth: Nobody lives long enough to tell every story they have in them, every story they are capable of telling.
If you’re going to be afraid anyway, get afraid of the right thing.
For those who are brave enough to seek feedback, I have an article coming up Thursday on how to critically evaluate the feedback you get and how to use it. For those who are not that brave, I have nothing useful but you should read anyway because it might still be funny.
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