“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”
Winston Churchill
Everyone’s heard of a masterpiece – some great tour de force of art or craft. Fewer folks, but some, have heard of an apprenticepiece – now a miniature work of cabinetry, originally a kind of final project to prove the apprentice was ready to graduate to journeyman. Today, I’m going to talk about what I call a mistresspiece.
I call it a mistresspiece partly for the wordplay, and partly because the writer friend I was talking to and I could not for the life of us think of a masculine or gender-neutral term for “mistress,” as in a dedicated long-term lover, even though she thought it was mainly straight women writers that cultivate mistresspieces.
As for me: I love Doña Ana Lucía, I do. She’s been my main project for the better part of three years. I love the sheer, silly, solarpulp joy. I love the prose and the two-fisted action and the excuse to pull out another Cool Thing because that’s half the point. I look forward to many years and many books with her. But at this point, I also detest Doña Ana Lucía. Three years is a long time with one book, even a fun one. You get tired, you get bored, you get stifled. You need something different.
And your eye starts to wander. Ideas drift in front of you, one catches your eye, and it’s an idea that can work, and idea you like, an idea that likes you. It’s exciting. It feels illicit. And you promise you’ll just take a couple notes now and dutifully return to your current project, maybe call the idea back when you’re done…
…and then you wake up one morning with a chapter of the other project drafted, and it was the most fun you’ve had writing in months.
It always starts out fun, but slowly becomes more serious as you become more committed to the other project, almost as much as you are to your main project. Suddenly, you have two parallel serious writing projects: your masterpiece and your mistresspiece.
Here’s where the metaphor splits, because while cheating on your flesh-and-blood partner(s) is never not going to hurt them, cheating on your book is sometimes the best thing that could happen to it. I came back to Doña Ana Lucía after writing “Glâcehouse” renewed, and produced one of the best scenes of the novel. That was a short story, a winter fling, a stolen kiss of sweet prose. The effect goes double for mistresspieces – Doña Ana Lucía Serrano and Marybeth Delilah Potter influence and rejuvenate each other, although the two heroines and their two books could not be more different.
So if you’re getting tired of your current book, you might take a break, work on something else for awhile…even if it feels naughty. Just be sure to keep giving your main project love and care. And if that something else turns into something serious, too, you’ve found yourself a mistresspiece.
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