Swan Maiden Writing

It’s funny how many fairytales and myths revolve around skin. Not just selkies, but also swan maidens. If you took their skins, you had them forever.

Recently I’ve been thinking of my writing as a process of removing my skin.

Before you go “ew” and try to claw out your eyes, let me explain.

All of us walk around in hard shells. We have to. Oh, maybe it was different at one time for each of us, I don’t know. When was the time you got stomped on and learned to put up a front, learned to put up a shield? When was the time you walked, puppy like, up to a group of other kids, expecting they would of course like you, and ended up pounded?

I remember the moment for my older son with almost painful clarity. No, he didn’t get pounded. If you knew you, you’d know that’s silly. He’s always been… well… built like the proverbial brick sh*thouse. But he was our first and we thought would be only child, born after six years of infertility. And he was a good baby. Slept through the night at four weeks. We delighted in him, and in his first year of life never even raised our voice to him, much less showed him impatience. He was healthy and we protected him, so he was never hurt.

And then we took him for vaccinations. They asked us to hold him, so he wouldn’t move, and they stabbed him quickly on each thigh with the syringes. The look of sheer betrayal in his face. It wasn’t the pain, I don’t think. It was the betrayal that we’d taken him here, allowed him to do this. And though of course, he doesn’t remember that, I swear he’s been more wary since.

Now, by the time most of us reach adulthood, we’ve had hundreds of such experiences, and we’ve learned to shelter ourselves from the… slings and arrows of capricious fortune. Part of it is the “I didn’t want it, anyway” and part of it is the “I’m too old to expect they’ll love me at first sight.” Etc.

This works okay in life. It would be very weird, frankly, to be an adult sauntering into a party with the eagerness of a two year old. And I think if you went around putting everything in your mouth – yes, yes, you, you know who you are – just to see how it tasted, someone would probably put you away. (Hey, my oldest used to eat dead bugs. From the windowsills. Until I caught him…)

So in life, we need our skin, our tough shell, our protection.

The problem is when you bring that protection into writing. It’s lovely in a way, isn’t it? You can write and keep it at a distance from yourself, from the parts of yourself that count.

This means different things to different people. Many people are afraid to write about sex, for instance, because it’s too close. Others will not write about emotion. Or pain. (You try reading a book that’s all joy joy, happy happy, then tell me it was any good. Even feel good books have dark moments. Some people flinch from the supernatural. Others from murder.

I confess to having had problems with all of those, at different times in my career. But there is more to it than that. Weirdly, I noticed something while listening to books. Listening somehow makes it more personal. I listen to books while walking, too, which I guess makes it more intimate – there’s no distraction of a physical book in front of you.

Anyway, I noticed that all the really good books, the ones that grab, have what can only be called “writer personal hang ups.” For instance, it’s clear that Heinlein liked cats. Or that Terry Pratchett nurtures a taste for the same sort of greasy spoon I love: the acid coffee, the burnt crunchy bits.

For me those are probably the hardest part. It’s the silly stuff you like or don’t like that’s really close to your heart. If you let it out there, people will be worried. Or shocked. Or bored. They won’t understand. They’ll make fun of your toys. You’re that little kid again, walking up to the group of older kids, and you just know they’re going to pound you.

And then there’s letting my characters bleed. I mean, really bleed, really suffer. I don’t want to. It’s not even that I don’t want to hurt them. It’s that I don’t want people to see it. What? People might think I enjoy my characters’ suffering. And besides everyone is entitled to privacy in their distress, right? No, no they’re not. It turns out people who love your characters love them more if they see them bleed. Not cosmetic bleeding, but go for the jugular and follow it down, in detail, while they bleed and twitch.

Lately I’ve been writing with no skin on and it leaves you oddly sensitive, oddly raw to the world afterwards. You have to remember “I must put my skin on again. I must go out in the world and be normal again.”

In that sense, it is the opposite of the swan maidens. When you have your skin on, you’re just someone like everyone else. You have to take the skin off to be the magical being beneath.

And even if it hurts – a keyboard is a blunt implement to remove skin with – you dance so much freer on the page without it.