There comes a point in a writer’s life where so much work has been done that suddenly, out of nowhere, something re-appears.
Look. I save my work, I really do. But needless to say, most things are scratched onto scrap pieces of paper, whatever I had available at the moment, and, if I didn’t pursue them, are tossed into the stack of whatever was accumulating then. So, believe me, after some years of shuffling, you run across writing you never even remembered you had.
And it can be quite the experience. It takes you soaring through the lands of what writing was like back then, or how you felt about life or why in the hell DID you put that word there, because it absolutely makes you cringe now?? So you sit there, ponder, smile, and throw the thing into a file that says “Old Writing”, which basically is a stack of time bombs waiting to go off. Because if you are a really clever writer, you will take the time one day to leaf through those momentos , and inspiration will suddenly explode in your head; you will write down what, suddenly, you couldn’t write before. And, believe me, timing is everything.
Writing is like wine, you make it, but the longer it sits in the cellar, the better writing it becomes. And, each day, a new keg is added to the cellar, and an old one is taken out for dinner that evening. But sometimes you cannot have wine for dinner today, because no wine is ready to be drunk. When that happens, a writer has milk and waits for tomorrow, or next year, be that the case. But on those days, sometimes a writer will get lucky; he will be rummaging through an old box of things, and find an old wine keg, a time bomb, stop everything, and drink it. But those are his lucky days.
Most of the time, writing takes patience, or it will go wrong. I still have a poem hanging on my bullitan board that says, “Edit, or f- it”, because it was written too quickly. No, writing is like coaxing a cat to come to you. Too fast, it might nearly bite your finger off. Too slow, the cat will lose interest and walk away. Plus, you can’t call a cat; imagine how awkward if your Siamese just came right to you like your dog would when you called her name. Writing, like your Siamese, is on it’s own accord and agenda.
Of course, you can tame it. You can say, at 3:00 I will write something. And you will. Something will most definately come to you at 3:00 if you really want to write it. If you have an idea of what you want to write, great; writing will most likely appeal to your fingers more. But nothing can prepare you for the surprise: your own un-earthed creativity and inspiration. You never know definately what you will write until you sit down to the page. And so, writing remains a wild beast.
And when you are done, you tuck it away for awhile. And, if it’s really good, when you find it, you will revise it tediously. Then you will put it away awhile longer, and then display it, in all it’s glory, to someone out there who can read it too. And even then, something will come up, “Yes, I remember when I wrote this,” you will exclaim awhile later, and fly away to another land.
Because there comes a point in every writer’s life when something, wildly, re-appears. That’s how it works, didn’t you know (??), for every writer must un-earth.
The Rose 