It was wonderful to see so
many of you at our NE SCBWI Spring Regional Conference in Nashua, NH in April.
I hope everyone had as good a time and learned as much as I did. Huge
congratulations to Anna Boll and her team for putting together such a tremendous
event!
During spare moments at the
registration table I found myself thinking a lot about the conference’s theme
of “Many Voices”. While the conference organizers and presenters did an amazing
job of addressing an external world definition of the phrase, one that spoke to
diversity, community and inclusiveness, I also began to connect it to a more
internal and personal meaning…the many voices that pop into my head, especially
when I am trying to write.
We’ve all heard self help
specialists talk about our inner child and lots of writing books try to help
you deal with your inner editors, but I suspect that some of you are like me,
and have not just one or two voices, or facets of our personality, raising a
ruckus in there, but a whole town council budget meeting going on every time
you pick up a pen or touch the keyboard.
For me a typical morning
goes like this…My inner traffic controller is the first to speak up and complain
that I don’t have the time to write right now, there are litter boxes/dishes/windows/gutters
to clean. My inner bully chimes in and says I don’t have anything worthwhile to
say anyway. My inner mother thinks I should have a cookie, my inner gym teacher
says I should drop and give him 20 just for thinking about the cookie. My inner
editor says how can I even think about working on anything else when I haven’t touched
the rewrite on that ‘What does a Cement Engineer do?’ article for the paying
job. My inner cheerleader thinks I’m S-U-P-E-R, so I let my inner Clint
Eastwood smother her with her own pompoms. My inner slacker thinks all of this
is a hoot, but would prefer to watch bad horror movies and microwave
marshmallow chicks until they explode. And this all takes place in the 20
seconds or so it takes me to walk across my office and sit in front of my
computer.
If this all sounds familiar
to you, sorry, I don’t have any pearls of wisdom or magic mute buttons to shut
them up. The only coping mechanism I’ve learned that helps me survive this
daily cacophony is to simply do my best to ignore them. Much like certain
relatives, I let them rant and rave, smile sweetly, thank them for their
opinion and then just continue to do whatever it was I was planning to do
anyway. And most days it works, but every now and then, I have to admit, the
cookies and the bad horror movies do win out, just promise not to rat me out to
the gym teacher.
