Yesterday, I had the first fraught meeting with a new editor over the first 30 pages of my memoir. Through our respective computer screens, we came to know each other via the discussion of what wasn’t working for my story. Sending my competent-but-not-effective work to a stranger would have scared the Hell out of the old me, but there comes a point when you have to let go of fear, especially when the creative world is calling your name.
“Play with your story,” the editor told me. “The story is cerebral and fresh and you have something big that the world needs.”
The praise was great for validating my efforts, but I paid to hear criticism. The story lacks an effective structure, something to hold its complexity and my voice in one body. As it is now, it resembles a page of amateur spirograph drawings. Remember how the plastic plate would slip from its pivot, ruining the concentricity of the circle? That pivot point is the equivalent of story structure.
Sometimes, letting go of original constructs is what it takes to improve the overall coherence of a story. Psychology is the spine of our emotions and we create stories in our mind to explain how things must be, but what if we’re wrong? What if we toss our own doubts and fears into the air and let them land differently? Where might we go when we accept an invitation to step from a point where we were once positioned to a new, different approach?
So, now I must play and think creatively to better serve the story which only I can tell. How about you? Are you emotionally wrung out? Which stories in your mind can be let go? How might you construct a better perspective of your truth to align with the worth of your one and only life?
BARBIE BEATON 
I stunk at Spirograph.
Me too! It was not perfect the way I wanted it to be. So defeating.