You know me—I love metaphors for writing and the writing life. We’ve all heard that a writing project is like the writer’s child: you love it with all your heart, you’ve poured so much of yourself into it, you feel protective of it, etc. etc. etc. Now that I have a child of my own, I can see how fitting this metaphor really is.

See, when you have a newborn baby, you love her right away—yes, you love her madly—but . . . well, she’s just sort of lump of flesh at first. At first, she doesn’t do much of anything but eat, defecate, sleep, and cry, cry, cry. She doesn’t have much of a personality yet. In fact, in many ways, a newborn baby is still sort of a fetus. The human brain is so large that babies must be born before they’re actually developed so they can fit through the mother’s cervix. It’s true! Most (or maybe all, I can’t remember) other animals are FAR more developed by the time they’re actually born. Just think about all those baby animal births you’ve seen on PBS, where the second the baby is born, he begins walking.

So when a baby human is born, like a new writing project, she isn’t really anything yet, just an untapped ball of potential. Now what I’ve already discovered is that if you try to force things with your baby—if you, for example, want to convince her to play with a certain toy before she’s developed an interest in it herself—you’ll get nowhere. You have to let baby take the lead. She’ll let you know what she wants to do by trying different things and paying close attention to how she reacts to them. If she doesn’t want that toy, or if she doesn’t want to be read to just now, she’ll cry. Then you stop and try something else or take a break and just snuggle for a while.

As time goes by and you let her dictate what she wants to do and when, she begins to develop and become more of a human being, less an exposed fetus. She starts to show preferences (my little Amalie, for example, loves her Winnie the Pooh with jingle bells in his belly, which her Nonnie and Bapa bought for her at Disneyland); she even starts to smile! And you become more and more attuned to who she is and how to be with her.

This is how a new piece of writing develops. In my experience, if you try to force your preconceived notions of what the piece will be, it just won’t work. If, instead, you sit back and let the piece guide you, experimenting with different things and paying close attention to what works and what doesn’t, things will come together much more smoothly, though they may not come as quickly as you want.

My Amalie is now almost eight weeks old. Eight weeks. Already, she’s so different than she was eight weeks ago when I gazed into her blue, blue eyes for the first time; still, she has a long way to go before she’s ready to function out in the real world on her own. If I were to call up, say, an employment agency and ask them to secure a job for my eight-week-old baby, they’d either think I was joking or crazy. Yet this, essentially, is what many amateur writers do when they submit a rough draft for publication (and proofreading to catch the grammar and punctuation errors does not turn a first draft into a final draft, as any English teacher will tell you).

I’m not saying you have to spend eighteen years revising every single piece, but hey, let’s not rush things, okay? Your “baby” will develop exactly as quickly as is right for it, and one day you’ll be able to send it out into the real world proud of all the work you put into it and knowing that you both are much better for the experience.