Brilliance in the Unrefined

I’m not going to say that I was any good, but I am going to say that I was better than I thought at the time. I first began writing in a series of phases; play writing first, then poetry and then finally prose. I penned my first play in 1993, it is called Tones and it is essentially an adaption of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. About four years later after I read some very inspiring poetry from a friend of mine I thought I would explore that genre. Despite my best efforts I had never been a fan of poetry, at least in the classical sense, and well, honestly in the “beat” sense as well. I’m not sure if this is because, not unlike classical symphonic and jazz music, it takes a bit a trained ear for some to appreciate. I approached poetry from a novice’s standpoint and never claimed to be a poet, only a dabbler. Around 2000, about three years after my foray into poetry and during my relapse back into play writing, I decided to attempt to write short stories. I wrote a handful of short-short stories and short stories over the next few years. As I began to refocus on acting as a primary creative outlet and more recently the “day job” I put the plays, the poetry and the prose aside.

I was in the process of doing the fifth drafts of my two experimental short-short stories, I Watch the Morning and We Will Be Here Forever when I started reviewing my earlier stabs at prose. I opened a few documents when I stumbled across something I had been playing around with called Boxcars. I don’t know if it was the mood I was in, or a lack of oxygen to the brain, but I was literally astounded at how well it read. To be clearer, I was not sure I had written it at all. There were images, flows of dialog and the over all subject matter and even the voice its self did not seem like mine, and however, it all seemed very familiar to me. It was indeed mine, though. Needless to say I brought the document to the surface, so to speak, and am going to edit it and if it comes together as well as I anticipate it might actually be the strongest short-short story I have to date and might even warrant competition. Then again, I might be jumping the gun.

This brings me to an interesting revelation. It’s a twofold discovery: What we create in the moment, is often something worth holding onto. We might not see it clearly upon immediate examination; however, looking back it might have merit. It may even be quite brilliant! So make sure not to discard earlier projects, I believe early drafts can be valuable to some, however, the entire pursuit should be well preserved and revisited at a later date. Perhaps it is an influence on a current project or is simply worth reconstructing. I am not advocating 200+ spiral bound notebooks and a bogged down external hard drive, just the idea that sometimes we are too hard on ourselves or simply too close to something to see it clearly. Art is like life, you can’t claim to know everything about it, because that’s when you are wrong.