(E________, first draft: 10,300 words)
Some ideas are so bad, so obviously stupid, so not in your best interests, that you can’t stop acting on them.
Years and years ago, when I was a junior barrister, I had a court case in Stoke-on-Trent, England. Stoke, by the way, is at the heart of the region known as The Potteries, for all the fine china that is produced there. (Edward Smith, captain of the Titanic, was also born nearby.) Stoke was roughly an hour up the road from where I lived at the time so, prudent young man that I was, I left home an hour before I needed to get there.
For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, what barristers do and how they do it is a mystery to large chunks of the outside world. That said, the one thing almost everyone does understand about barristers is that they wear wigs and gowns when they appear in court. This, in fact, is not always true, but it was very true on this particular day. Turning up in court without a wig and gown in such situations feels pretty much the same as appearing naked in public. Judges, if they have a mind, will announce after you have spoken that they “can’t hear you,” and raising your voice won’t do the slightest bit of good. All you can do is slink shamefaced out of court and hope one of your colleagues of approximately the same size will take pity on you and let you borrow their duds. The price being, of course, that he or she gets first shot at spreading the tale of your abject humiliation around the barristerial community at large.
Needless to say, the one thing I did obsessively and repeatedly before getting in the car that morning was to check that I had packed my wig and gown. And there they were, packed (reasonably) neatly beside my law books and pink-ribboned “brief.”
As I rolled up the motorway with no margin for error I suddenly thought, “It would be horribly embarrassing if I forgot my wig and gown. Thank goodness I didn’t!” I’m sure I smiled a little at the absurdity of it and moved on to other things. Like my upcoming case.
But what if I had forgotten my wig and gown?
I didn’t.
Yeah, but what if you did?
The miles continued to roll by and soon the thought that I’d left my wig and gown behind became the only thing I could think about. I knew I’d packed my stuff properly. I knew if I stopped to check, I would be late for court. I knew I was being silly.
I pulled over anyway.
I arrived late.
This kind of irrational behavior is known as giving in to the “imp of the perverse,” after the 1850 story of the same title by Edgar Allan Poe.
“[T]hrough its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible.”
The other day, typing happily away at the early pages of E________, it suddenly occurred to me that what I was writing might be garbage. What if EK, the first of my two protagonists, comes across as a complete, total, unacceptable jackass? No one will like him, no one will read the book, it’s going to be a disaster. You should delete everything and start again.
I know this is a really stupid idea, the manifestation of some kind of insecurity or, possibly, a dodgy egg sandwich. But it would not go away. I literally had to turn off my computer and walk away from my desk to stop myself erasing several thousand words worth of work.
The next day I sat down, opened up my laptop and found that Poe’s evil imp was still sitting on my shoulder. At the end of the day, though, I managed to fight it off.
Two things saved me. First, I remembered a quote from that peerless mistress of SF, C.J. Cherryh: “It is perfectly okay to write garbage–as long as you edit brilliantly,” which transmogrified in my head to, “Write first. Worry later.” Then my second protagonist, AE, made her first appearance. As she is, in many ways, EK’s antithesis, writing her was like pouring antacid on the indigestion EK is causing me. I stopped worrying and got back to the sheer joy of throwing words onto the page. The imp of the perverse has been beaten!
For now.