Bananas

Anyone who knows me knows I hate bananas. Hate. Them. But, I will make myself eat a banana every so often ... like, once every month or two. Why, you ask, when I hate them so? Because I know they're good for me. There are many other things with the same vitamins and nutrients and good-for-me elements that a banana has, and I do consume those quite a bit more often - cantaloupes, strawberries, tomatoes, and hello, orange juice, just to name a few - but every so often, if there's a banana in the house, I really just have this weird urge to eat one. I did that earlier today, and I can still taste it. Bleccchh. (The WGH and I tried one of those crazy diets once where you have to eat a certain prescribed combination of foods every day, and one day we had to eat four bananas. FOUR. In the same day. Quadruple-bleccchh.)

Now, I'm sure you probably didn't stop by the Lunch Room today to hear me rant about bananas (although they are on the menu if that suits your fancy), but as always, there's a method to my madness. So here's my wildcard way of connecting bananas to writing - sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do when it means you'll get some benefit from it, would you agree? Take, for example, the dreaded rewrite.

(Yep, that's where I was headed. Bananas and rewrites. Okay, so not profound, but you gotta admit it's different.)

You have your manuscript. You've slaved over it for months, getting that story down on paper. It's good, and you love it. Right? Meh, maybe not so much. But it's a start. Now you go back through it, nitpicking every little thing, making sure there are no gaping holes in your storyline, making sure all the minute details jibe (like your hero's eyes are the same color on page 315 that they were on page 3 and don't suddenly change halfway through the book - he's not a mutant, for crying out loud ... unless you write paranormal or sci-fi, but that's a horse of a different color ... er, never mind), beefing up that character development here, cutting a few extraneous words there, slaving over it until it's as nearly perfect as you can get it. And then you send it off to your critique partner or your editor or your first reader or whoever, and they send it back with their comments and you start the whole process all over again.

Wait, is this what I signed up for?

Well, yeah. It is.

To truly accomplish what you set out to do for your book, to get it into its ... for lack of a better term (and in keeping with my theme) healthiest state, you have to eat that banana. You have to do the tedious, arduous, hard and heavy nose to the grindstone work - polish, polish, polish - that drudgery that you don't look forward to but know in your heart of hearts that doing it will be the most beneficial thing you can do for your book.

I should probably stop at this point long enough to say, if you're not a writer and you're reading this and truly beginning to worry for my sanity - don't. I'm like this all the time, and my writer buddies will attest to the genius of my argument. Right, guys? Guys? Anybody?

Anyway, it all boils down to the fact that we writers love what we do enough (or at least, we should) to really put forth the effort it requires to make that manuscript the very best it can be, and if it means eating a few bananas along the way (God forbid, even four in a day), then that's what we'll do. And for you readers out there who to this point are still befuddled by all this fruit foolishness, know this ... that book you have in your hand is the product of many, many long hours of hard work - a labor of love, in a sense, and its writer did his or her very best to make it worth your taking the time to read it. Even the extra stuff that we don't really like to do.

You'll just have to excuse the little mushy white smudges on page 237. That was a banana day.

Read a book. Eat a banana. They're both good for you!

=) JB

"The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think."
-- Harper Lee, American writer, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for To Kill a Mockingbird