Hi there,
From Randomwordgenerator
I have been suffering from a lot of “what is the point”ness, recently. I feel like taking my life’s etch-a-sketch and shaking it ’til there is nothing left. Watching as all the connecting lines magically erase and I don’t need to account for any of it any more or justify why I did such and such or why I think the way I do, blah blah blah.
It’s not that I have a bad life, because just a wee wander through this blog would show all of you that I have done so well on the family/relationship/comfortable scale. No, I am going through this turmoil or depression or whatever we are calling it; and the symptoms are getting worse with writing them out, not fluffing better. I just have this horrible urge to rip EVERYTHING all up and start over.
I can’t do that, of course, so my creative works are in jeopardy instead.
I was so close to binning my almost-twenty-years-in-the-writing-so-far novel (all 80k-odd words of it) yesterday. I took all the pages out of the folder, and mashed them all up, and chucked them in a laundry basket to be taken down to the recycling bin.
Hubby was trying to talk ‘sense’ into me, but it felt so good to have something tangible to discard!!! To be able to literally screw it all up in my hands and fling it far from me; feel the binder I kept it in get lighter – like I didn’t have to carry all those words inside me any more. I didn’t have to feel guilty for shelving it, I didn’t have to answer to the characters any more, I would have a few less voices in my head being insistent and needing me to keep them alive.
Fictional characters can be maimed and killed off and no one has to know; and even if you have readers, if the characters aren’t on the page taunting you any more, then that’s ok – right?!!
Well, apparently not. Just ask J.K Rowling today.
So the pages are all collated again. Wrinkled and scarred but readable. Hubby and Eldest won. My characters are still annoying me, because I inadvertently read bits while sorting the 140 pages out.
But in my head, this happened:
Commemorate Assessment Product Work Out Method Formation Cute Sector Prosecute
As I watch it burn,
That pile of words
Meant to commemorate
My early twenties’ thinking:
Well!
I felt a sense of release –
An assessment taking place.
The tendrils of fire
Caressed bundled pages,
Incinerated the product
Of many wasted hours.
My husband stood, distraught,
Whispering how I could have
Made it all work out;
Found some method whereby
The formation of my art
Could fit in with our cute charges.
It’s funny how ‘art’
Is its description as it makes fire dance;
But it resides in the
‘Hobby sector’, otherwise.
My children can’t understand
Why my writing is dying.
Their eyes prosecute me
As I turn to walk back in.
*Sigh*
I was hoping to erase the blog, too.
Yet here we are…
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May 3rd, 2017 at 12:18 am
I can’t do anything but smile after reading this. I’ve destroyed a lot of writing myself. 🙂 I am happy you’re sticking with it though. 🙂
May 3rd, 2017 at 9:40 am
My first reaction is to be sad, because I love your writing, but I really get that it is so liberating to create something then also be its destroyer!! There are so many parts of life that we are forbidden to do this to, and that we can feel trapped by. But to own our thoughts, and be able to erase the ones that are causing us pain…that is such a psychological boost. I often wonder if published authors ever wish they had burnt it all, do we ever really have peace when our thoughts are in others’ hands?! x
May 3rd, 2017 at 1:07 pm
It is very clever of you to have created this poem as a way of avoiding actually destroying what I am sure is a very interesting and worthwhile novel. Reading the background to the poem makes it all doubly interesting.
May 3rd, 2017 at 3:33 pm
😉 there is a lot of swearing… x