I was writing a novel, a first novel, after publishing a book of short stories, and said novel was not going well. I had already missed two deadlines and had no hope of making the third. Since the book was so late, I decided that the writing had to be perfect, not just the language, the metaphor, the simile, the dialogue, and the character development but the way the words looked on the page. I started to notice the line breaks of the right margin and its row of crooked teeth, and decided that they needed to be as straight and as even as a movie star’s smile. I was no longer a writer but an orthodontist; word choices became cosmetic, punctuation like a tightening of wires.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 23:26:02 +0000
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