Writing Thoughts

It's easy to see why ideas have to be pooled, interrogated, developed and dropped to bring forth fresh ideas from the detritus of their beginnings. This is what's so very hard about writing anything. The process of one dipping a sanguinary pen into the wordy mix-up of a poem or story and knowing, not suspecting, but actually knowing, that most of the initial output will be bilge makes it hard to make that start. It's the knowledge that anything decent, before it can decorate the page, has to be prized from from remotest corners of a leaky brain and galvanized into something striking by a sliver of inspiration, if it turns up, and built up by head-spinning, mental hard graft.  But there's no other way.

I wrote a couple of poems the other day which I quite liked. This was despite them being the usual artless, sub-standard, naive scribblings you often find in a local papers when you're searching for a plumber or a second hand car. To get to the 'quite liking' stage I had fussed and picked and played around with them for hours, but somehow I knew, despite everything, I knew that a revisit would yield horror; and it did. What looked half decent when I tucked away - reading them three later induced waves of dizzying embarrassment, and heart jabs of quiet madness. Since then I have re-edited both and I really do now think them decent. Not about to submit them to competition decent - but, they look at least competent in that they appear to meet some of the poetic requirements of free-verse.

But this is it. Knowing that the first draft is going to be so terrible. And that the second draft won't be much better. This might very well be one of the major causes of writers block. Not dried up inspiration, not a deficiency in motivation, not a lack of ideas, not feelings of low self-esteem or crises of confidence, but just a depressing fear that everything you're going to write is always going to be rubbish and will need industrial strength work.

 And that's even if you understand that it has to be this way - much like the sculpture who has to turn a piece of ugly rock, a plain block of wood, or a lump of bronze into an artistic representation. The ugly starting point is amorphous before a framework can be deciphered, a semblance of what is being aimed at. Then it at least looks like something, even if it is a million miles from being what it needs to be. It's only during the the closer attention to detailing, the ever more specifying, the gradual finessing of the intricate, the unification of a multitude of parts gradually crafted together into one harmonious whole and allowing it to come alive and sing into the hearts of those who view it - only then does it matter.  The rest of the time it's a workshop, a sooty foundry, a splattered floor, an ugly lump squatting in a cloud of paint, powder or smoke. But none of that matters because no one is interested in the process,  It's only the finished article that matters.

Only the finished article matters. The bloody knuckles, the mess and the wreckage of the tools, the sleeplessness of nights,the damage to the heath and well-being, the howlings across the creative lake and the praying to the muses, don't.