With The Right Tool in Hand

I love my tool; long and plastic and red, as soon as I had it in my hand I could feel the vibrating energy waiting to be released all over the written word before me…

It may be strange to think of the red pen of editing: our “critiquing pens” as instruments of creativity, but it came to me as I was using it across a particularly fine piece of short story work, that just like a sculpting tool, our red pens chip away from the granite to reveal the best of what the literary artist is creating.

Even though I am still running toward the goal line of being published, my beloved novel held fast in the cradle of my arm; last night as I critiqued, I felt that I was sharing in another person’s creative process. Even though it was not my own, I was like a literary midwife. Actually, there were a few midwives, and we all assisted in the birth of a story-the creation of lives and worlds belonging to characters and places that did not stay in one person’s imagination, but were given a place in the reality of every reader who is privileged to read this story.

That is, after all, what all artists are: creators of scenes, world-builders. Next time your sit with your red pen, breathe in the creative work you do. With each stroke and each suggestion, you open the birth canal so the writer can give life to a story; the most precious gem any of our kind has to offer.