Born of Ragged Perfection

My writing process has never been very systematic. Despite all the structure I impose on myself at later stages in the process, my initial thoughts tend to flow best without too many rules to hem them in.  Nowhere does this haphazardness show up more than in my first drafts of poems and songs, which can read more like lists of brain-stormed images and metaphors than anything resembling meaning.

Case in point, this first draft:

The lines read as follows (cross-outs replicated):

And this is born of ragged perfection

Edges of a glimpse of glory

Past the never-ending story

Running off the gold-dipped (gilted) pages

Into chasms down below

There's an edge and there's the fraying

Threads unraveled, never staying

Put--unraveling bit by bit as long

as motion we're in motion

Stand still and

Bit by bit the thread unwinds

Stretching out in life and time

Peaks and va

Zig-zagged edges, then the stil

winds and turns

Scarlet threads within the maze

till the waves all straighten out

Every leaving naught to chance or doubt

The scarlet cord hung down a city wall

Straightens, flattens, turns into a line

Flatlining on the heart monitor--

No mo All stands still.

 

 

So this fragment definitely has some potential. There're some phrases I really like, one of which became the title of this blog post. The extended metaphor of a fraying thread representing a human life I also appreciate. As long as we're in motion we unravel. 

 

These lines were written as the second half of a song which takes place in the second half of a musical that I started writing at fourteen and promptly forgot about as soon as freshman year of high school started rearing its ugly head. Blech, high school. Revisiting the half-finished musical years later, I found the song's lyrics predictably terrible, sounding as if they were written by an angsty fourteen-year-old, mainly because they were written by an angsty fourteen-year-old. But the lyrics weren't irredeemably terrible: they were bursting with potential. I just needed to breathe new life into them. Hence the lines above.

 

I'll be honest: I didn't end up using this fragment at all. Nada. None of it.

 

At least not the way I was expecting to.

 

None of these lines made it into the final cut of the song. Introducing a new metaphor about the unwinding thread of life so close to the end of the song turned out to be confusing and unnecessary. 

 

What, then, was the use of writing these lines?

 

Potential.

 

Potential yet to be actualized.

 

The tingly-in-the-fingertips feeling of almost-thereness that I get when I read them. The snapshots of memories that spring to mind as I scan each line--fleeting, going, gone. The reminder that not everything I write needs to see the light of day, and that I write for all the shadows in between the page and the reader. Being able to determine that these lines turned out to be useless for the project they were intended for encourages me, because I am now assured that I know my vision for the musical well enough to know what not to include--even after years not working on it!

I realize that this isn't the most helpful post for aspiring writers. Hey, guess what? Some stuff you write might be completely useless, and the lines you like the most might just be the ones you have no use for. Not exactly an encouraging message. The only advice I could give at the end of this would be that if you, like me, have piles of throwaway scribblings that you're still holding onto, even though you feel like you should get rid of them--keep them with you a little longer.  Give your words time to breathe. Look at them with fresh eyes once you've forgotten what you wrote.

All will be well. All in time.

 

 

 

Till next time,

Clara