No. It’s not what you think.
My friends know I have two pet cats – Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent
I learned the term from Robin Jones Gunn. Sidenote: she’s amazing. I had the privilege of meeting her at the writer's conference I attended at the beginning of this month.
The second day of the conference I was beyond discouraged and felt like I should just pack up and leave. I was assailed by the constant thought…maybe writing is not for me. I’d had a meeting with an agent that, while encouraging, they didn’t want my work. They said in the future when I wasn’t as much of a greenhorn they’d love to see my stuff, but not what I had to offer them right now.
Downcast, I went to dinner and low and behold Robin sought me out. She said she asked God who to sit with and my face showed up in her mind and came and found me. With that declaration I felt like I owed her the truth about how I was feeling. Then she taught me the importance of drowning my kittens.
She explained that sometimes we are so in love with something we write, whether it be a couple pages, a paragraph, or an entire manuscript, but it needs to be thrown out. Chopped. Cut. Killed.
To a writer, once you’ve labored over something for months or years it becomes this cute, adorable, cuddly, fluff of a kitten to you. Everything about it makes you sigh and you can’t understand why it makes everyone else sneeze. Why don’t they see that this little cat is the most amazing thing ever? When that happens…its burlap sack time. You have to do the horrible deed that makes it feel like you’re ripping out your own heart. You have to toss your sweet baby in the sack, tie it, and toss it into the raging river. Gone. Don’t jump in after it. Let it die.
I’m at a point where I’m asking myself if I should kill my kitten. See, before the conference I thought I was one type of writer. But during the conference I came to the conclusion that what I was doing was not the direction I want to head down at all. I clearly felt during the conference (and since) that I should be writing historically based fiction. Not the current stuff I was trying for. I love made up worlds…and with history, it kind of gets to be that. I want to escape the humdrum of life in 2011, I love dreaming of the ‘old days’ for good and bad (because they weren’t as perfect as we all have been taught). I love the stories of the past that shape what we are today.
Anyway, back to my fuzzball. I went to the writer’s conference with a completed contemporary manuscript that was meant to be the first in a series of four books. I walked away from the conference with two publishers and an agent asking for copies of the manuscript to consider for publication – but I’ve sat on it since. See, I don’t know if I want it published now. Don’t get me wrong, any publishing would be amazing, but I don’t know if I want to spend my time branding myself along the lines of that series by writing the next three if I did get a contract.
So now I sit. Burlap sack in hand and unassuming kitty purring in sleep on my lap…do I drown him? Do I send his cute pictures to the editors and see what happens? Or do I set him aside and in a couple years go back?
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