Honor Your Writing as You Honor Yourself

Love your writing as you love yourself.

“Writing is its own reward.” — Henry Miller

How many pieces of your own writing do you love?

It would be great to say “Oh all of them. They are all my children and are beautiful and special. Little diamonds I have created myself.”

Yeah, right.

Love feels like too intense of a description for a piece this slight.

I don’t hate any of my writing. At least not any that were deemed good enough to be uploaded to Medium or to be read by anyone other than myself.

That’s a far cry from saying a piece is special. Or that I love them all. Still, if a story or essay was good enough to share with another, it has something I liked.

Today I wrote a piece for Medium that I really like. It is waiting for a publication editor to approve it. It isn’t important work. Love feels like too intense of a description for a piece this slight.

It is short. I’ve written pieces that were cleverer, in language and theme. I’ve written pieces that were more emotional in tone.

Other writing in my portfolio has more humor. Heck, more drama.

There is no real action. My cats look out through a window and watch one of the community cats sit on our lawn.

365 words. One minute, twenty-seven seconds of reading time.

I like it, anyway. I like it a lot.

Isn’t it great when you write something you like? I wrote it, edited it, submitted it to a publication, and went to dinner.

After coming home, I watched some television, not thinking about the piece. I took a bath.

It called to me as I got out of the tub. Might as well give it another look. Wouldn’t want the edit to have missed anything. I’ve missed things before.

One sentence got a rework. Other than that, the piece stands. My memory hadn’t failed me. I still like the short little bit of writing. I like it a lot.

I like what it says. I like how I said it. I especially like that the writing used cats to illustrate the thought.

If I shared my home with dogs rather than cats, the writing wouldn’t be very different. Dogs would be looking out the window instead of cats in that version. The point would be the same.

Squirrels might have ruined things… but probably not. We can attempt to identify with squirrels, right?

Sometimes a piece of writing wants to be written. When that happens, an author had better get out of their own way and let it happen.

This little nothing piece made me happy today. I didn’t struggle with it or try to twist it into something it wasn’t. I let it be what it wanted to be.

My husband once spoke of an interview he read with J. K. Rowling. In it, she relayed a conversation she had with her husband. She had killed off a character she loved and was emotional about it.

Her husband asked why she couldn’t let him live if it upset her so. After all, she was the author. She could do whatever she wanted.

Rowling explained that she couldn’t do that. The story wouldn’t let her. The character wouldn’t let her. He had to die at this point in the story.

Her husband didn’t understand. My husband didn’t understand either. He asked what I thought. He decided a long time ago he had married a writer.

I tried to explain it. I’m not an author of Rowling’s caliber. Few are. I am enough of one, however, to understand. Our characters demand things. Our stories demand things, too.

We may get things started but once they take off, we are on as much of a ride as our characters. Yes, we can re-write. We can force things to happen for expediency.

If the story or the characters don’t accept it, the changes will ruin the story. It will pull a reader out of the story immediately.

We don’t have to be a writer with the talent and success of J. K. Rowling or Stephen King to know this. We who put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard to create magic in our writing, know this.

Honor your writing as you honor yourself. Love your writing as you love yourself. Maybe not every little bit of it, but some of it. The bits of it that work. The bits you decide to share with others.

Hold the feeling close. There will be days that the writing doesn’t work. Days that you are trying to force things without realizing it. If whatever you are forcing remains in the final draft, it will sit there bothering you until the end of time.

I am holding this slight, unimportant piece close to me. It said what I wanted it to say. It even said it with cats.

I take it back. I don’t just like it. I love it.

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