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Do you know who knows what it's like to carry another human being inside their body? Experience round ligament pain, hemorrhoids, and indigestion? And then, after peeing every two minutes for a nine-month time span, push a human being out via a small, 10-centimeter hole while they excrete blood, sweat, and poop? You know who knows EXACTLY what that is like? A man.
A man like John le Carre who recently compared writing a book to birthing a baby.
Completing a book, it’s a little like having a baby ... There’s a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.
Having written books and having given birth, this wasn't how I would describe the process -- but what do I know? I'm just a woman. I didn't have relief and satisfaction when I felt my daughter slip out of my body. I had my heart literally explode to the outside of my body, as if she was pulling out my internal organs with her -- both figuratively and literally. I cried and screamed and the incessant worrying began -- never pausing even though she is now 6-years-old -- twisting my body to see her, to hear her Apgar scores, to fret about where she was in relation to my throbbing body, still prone on the table, waiting for her twin brother to join her.
And, you know, I hoped I got it right with each of them rather than looking ahead to future kids with a shrug of "oh well, there's always next time!"
But, it's fitting that a man likens putting words together to creating a live human being, because -- as a woman who would know best -- I always compare book writing to being kicked in the balls:
Writing a book, it's a little like getting kicked in the nutsack. First, there is the sharp pain of having the words flow faster than you can get them on the page, and then the burning agony of not being able to transfer the brilliant ideas from the brain to the paper. After a writing session, it is a throbbing ache as the person realizes they have to scrap everything they have written at the next edit and start anew.
See, it's a perfect analogy.
If le Carre can't let go of the idea of comparing books to reproduction, at least get the analogy closer to reality:
Publishing a book is like experiencing infertility.
There is this thing you really want -- something you should be able to do if you dedicate the time and energy to the process, because, after all, other people have gotten to do this book publishing/baby-making thing in the past. So you do all the work and send out the query letters and get your heart stomped on month after month as the rejection letters/negative pregnancy tests pour back in -- often without explanation.
And sometimes in frustration, the writer/almost-parent considers walking away from the whole publishing/baby-making process, especially because often, there is not a clear answer for why the process is so damn difficult. But it's hard to talk a heart set on publishing/parenting that it would be okay if you walked away. So you stick around and invest more time, more money, more emotional energy.
And then one day, you get an agent/positive pregnancy test and you feel like you're finally on the right road! You want to celebrate, but you're so damn scared -- for good reason. The reality is that this first hoop is merely a first hoop to jump through in order to bring home a published book/live baby. And many writers/almost-parents experience more frustration/loss on their way to a publishing contract/live baby.
And if you have stayed in the game this long, you most likely know a lot of other writers/almost-parents, and invariably, many will have gotten to the finish line while you are still running the race. And it will make
