Are you a wild rose kind of writer? Or would your rose take first place at a flower show? If you’re lucky, you’re both. I tend toward the wild side of writing, at least in my dreams. And yet, I spend countless hours ensconced in my comfortable writing room chair—the one covered with the star quilt Gram made me when I was a kid in Iowa—rewriting and perfecting manuscripts. The thing is, perfection is more of a dream (read impossible) than choosing the wild rose way. What do you think? Click here to read “Call of the Wild Rose” and comment, if you so choose. I’d love to read your thoughts.
Tom Robbins, who I think is among the best novelists going, is said to write one sentence, polish it, make sure it is the best it can be (hard to imagine his using the word perfect) and moves on to the next sentence. His prose is so wild, so pyrotechnical, so crazy, it is hard to imagine it coming from a process so laborious. So what? Some of us write like throwing paint on a huge canvas. Others write like building a Swiss watch. Either way, what matters is what readers do with it. Do they love it? Do they see their own truth there? Meg Barnhouse has had many people come up to her at readings and say, “Until I read your writing, I thought I was the only one who thought like this.” That is connecting with readers where they live. That is what matters no matter how we get there. Great piece, Nan. Thank you for the inspiration and the perspiration.
Thanks for reading and commenting, Pat. You’re erudite, as always!