The Beast with Teeth

This is a picture of Kingdok, the leader of the rat creatures from Jeff Smith’s phenomenal comics series, Bone.

My son and I have been slowly reading it together—he has read it already but wanted to share it with me. The rat creatures are pretty horrifying, but not especially smart or cunning—at least not quite as smart or cunning as the protagonists, which is a good thing.

They remind me of someone else, though. You see, for the last few weeks, I have not been writing as much on this blog because I have been writing fiction. I wrote fiction a lot as a boy, but less as I grew older. I became fascinated with movies and so much of my creative writing went toward developing stories for the screen, or actually writing screenplays.

My wife challenged me to sit down and write a piece of one of the stories I’ve talked about forever, so I did. I chose a small piece—a short story taking place in the timeline of a much larger story (that has to do with the gothic); a story I had been developing for a while, too, so one I felt equipped with enough information to actually write. It was a great experience. I became fairly obsessed with what I was doing. I wrote most days for at least a little while and found that it was something I could, in fact, do.

Writing it, I was able to forget myself and write without self-censorship, for the most part. Being in that space for an extended time, I was able to focus, not doubt myself, just keep pressing on and create a finished draft. Almost the whole time, I was able to keep the Beast with Teeth at bay. This is a demon inside of me, you see, that works very hard, sometimes, to destroy my self confidence, my will, my pleasure and good feeling, and tear me apart, hungrily, until I am a bloody lump of dead flesh. It likes to remind me of all of my shortcomings, real and imagined, and taunt me contemptuously when I am foolish enough to try something creative.

And for a little while, I held him at bay better than I have done in years. But I finished the draft, see. And the Beast came back, more savage and bloodthirsty than ever. It is gnawing away at my insides even now.