Last night I went to my friend Jan’s Before party in her new condo. The walls are pea green, there’s an emerald green fake grass carpet out on the patio, ugly carpeting elsewhere and odd wall configurations in the bathroom. But Jan’s a professional interior designer (and a terrific one) so I can only imagine how this place will look in two or three months when she gives the After party. But what fun to see it Before!
This is something we never get a chance to do with writers and their work. We never see the pages that veered off into the wrong direction (those emerald green grass carpets of prose), the crossed out words, the deleted paragraphs, whole chapters, or whole books that had to be written to get to the one that was finally published.
Many of us believe that ‘real writers’ sit down and simply do it. Oh, maybe they’ll polished a few sentences or do a rewrite or two, but the writers we love surely, well, they just do it. The only “just do it” that all my writer friends do is sitting down to work every day. And they work hard.
Here’s a link to my friend and student Carrie Friedman’s hilarious essay online at the Washington Post. She’s a writer who works hard everyday – plus has two toddlers. But she just does it.
photo (through Jan’s condo window) by Kara Fox
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