She stands behind me, looking down over my shoulder at my paper. It doesn’t matter if I lean forward or sideways, if I protectively curl my arm around the page. She can still read every word. If I looked up, at her face, I would encounter boredom or perhaps a sneer.
Conjured from the place where dark things live, I unknowingly summon her each time I sit to write an essay. I want her to have big teeth, green skin, and orange hair. I want the monster to be ridiculous so as to be less frightening. Instead, she is faceless. The anonymity of the specter means she could be anyone. Even you.
Her stare is impatient, demanding, and the effect Medusa-like. I attempt to hide from it, as I scratch words on the page. And as I scratch out words on the page. She would be no less irritating if she filed her nails, the keratinous dust filling my hair. Her presence questions my efforts. Who cares?
I must care, or I would give up. Despite her loitering, I write word by word. It is a sort of progress. Just as putting one foot in front of the other covers distance, putting one word after another covers a page and expresses an idea. The expression of an idea is precisely what her presence risks.
I introduce, and she barely notices. I describe, and she yawns. By the time I reach my conclusion, the scratch-scratch of her nail file fills my ears.
She’s right.
The first draft is a nightmare, scattered imagery, a lack of progression, shoddy transitions, and if there is an introduction at all, it has no connection to the end—the circle is anything but full. She jabs me with the pointy tip of her nail file. Lame, she insists. Dull. Jab. Jab.
I see something in the tangle of words, the scrawl of first-draft penmanship, that gives me pause. It’s a partially developed idea, a strong image, a sense of structure after all. It is small, but bright and hopeful. It is enough.
On draft two, sh stands back. Not far enough, but it’s an improvement. She can no longer stab me. She may roll her eyes still, but boring does not pass her lips. On the third draft, when order has been established and revisions are no longer about repairing, but refining, she sits idly in the corner, hoping I will blunder.
She is mean, but not very difficult to defeat, after all. The key is to simply keep writing. When I doubt myself, my ideas, my ability to form a sentence, I keep writing. As the words flow, the mind relaxes, the ideas come, prose takes shape. If it’s a bad shape? Slovenly and lopsided like pumpkins left to rot in the field? The strikethrough is my savior. With one stroke of my hand, it is forgotten. I have moved on. With the same hand, pencil still tucked in my fingers. I wave her away, banished. Until the next time.
She is the specter of the reader.
Everyone’s a critic.
