Saturday, December 19, 2015

Overheard at the Counter: what is completed writing?

so essentially the question is what makes a completed writing?  What if you have a million words simply splayed across yellowed pages in old notebooks?  and stuffed into files on slipdrives?  what if you have half-scratched-out stories, slivers of poems, three lines of what might have been song lyrics?  if it is incomplete is it still writing?

the idea is there, hidden behind the words.  in fact, the idea might even be obscured by the words.  half-formed, inadequate, like some sort of miscarriage: it was only ever the hope of being something other than the slight knit of words that constitute the few bones, the empty sack of flesh.

that is what these ideas are, nothings that could have been something.   so therein lies the choice, because you, the writer, do have the choice . . . you can revisit them, put them back into the mind's womb and bring them to full term.  or else you can give them a name and then bury them, somewhere in a plot of the virtual corner of the back yard, and pretend you had at one time a child that was never able to be given the light, a voice, or a chance.  and it will be forever perfect in its lost potentiality.


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