I was going to write this about the selection for my next session (session 5 of 6) and then I realised I’ve written about that before, in fact it feels like I’ve written too often about the angst of what to cover. I started thinking instead about why it seems so important.
For me, perhaps the greatest lesson I’ll take from the mentoring scheme so far is how to assess my own writing. I’m coming to terms with the idea that the elements of the story I most enjoy at the writing stage aren’t necessarily the best. In fact, it’s probably the case that these are the most dangerous because if I like a passage I’m less likely to be objective when it comes to editing it, so it’s exactly these sections that are most likely to escape my red pen.
There’s an adage in writing ( it seems to be full of them! ) that says ‘kill your babies’ and I think this is exactly what it’s warning about. Your babies are the work you’re closest to, which makes it so much harder to see them when they aren’t right. Or maybe I can see them, I just hate to lose them.
All of this is probably a long way around identifying that when I’m choosing what to send to Miranda for each session what I’m actually doing is trying to work out which of my babies to send to the slaughter, and that just selecting them is a tacit acknowledgement that I have already recognised their fate.
