One of the Harry Potter series bonus books is a slim volume called Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by Newt Scamander. This small book, written and illustrated by J.K. Rowling, describes the creatures of her magical world. All the profits were donated to Comic Relief UK. I was scanning it this morning–Frick had dropped it on the floor by his bed, and since it had text, well, I had to pick it up–and came across this interesting description:

RUNESPOOR

…A three-headed serpent, the Runespoor commonly reaches a length of six or seven feet…each of the Runespoor’s heads serves a different purpose. The left head (as seen by the wizard facing the Runespoor) is the planner. It decides where the Runespoor is to go and what it is to do next. The middle head is the dreamer (Runespoors may remain stationary for days at a time, lost in glorious visions and imaginings). The right head is the critic and will evaluate the efforts of the left and middle heads with a continual irritable hissing. The right head’s fangs are extremely venomous.

I don’t know about you, but I started thinking all writerly at that point. As in, a Runespoor is a lot like me–or vice versa. With all the activity up there, it feels like three different heads are arguing. All writers have a planner (mine for writing is a bit stuck at the moment), and certainly a dreamer. And without a doubt, we have a critic.

Ah, yes, the vicious inner critic. The one that tells you that you’re no good, that you’re wasting your time, that writing is a pointless effort and there’s no sense in blowing all that nice housecleaning time on piffle such as novels or characters and suchlike. You know, that head. The one that rules the roost, especially if you are, as many writers can be, even the slightest bit neurotic or oversensitive.

If I polled all my writer friends, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they all have that third Runespoor head, venomous and constantly hissing. Why do you bother? That’s dreck. That book’s worse. That heroine is TSTL. That hero deserves to get his brawny ass kicked. You stink. Shouldn’t you be taking up knitting? And so on, and so on, and so on. Hey, we’re writers. We can come up with creative ways to say “you suck” all the time!

Maybe we should take our cue from Rowling, who informs us that:

The Runespoor rarely reaches a great age, as the heads tend to attack each other. It is common to see a Runespoor with the right head missing, the other two heads having banded together to bite it off.

Guess it’s about time to bite that bad boy off. I have a book to write next month.