A while ago, I talked about giving yourself the freedom to figure out what you’re trying to say by simply writing until you dig it up. I wrote over 400 words about a poker table before I came up with the one sentence I was looking for.
Does that mean all those other words were wasted? No, of course not. Even if they’re never used in the final product, they’re no more useless than the scaffolding that builders put up around a building and then tear down once it’s finished. The building wouldn’t have gotten as tall without something no one will ever see besides the people who put up that framework and then tore it back down.
At the time, I was in the “digging” phase of a book and I wrote this scene that I love, but might not ever end up getting used for anything:
Piano was [maman’s] happy time. I don’t know what she did when she was sad. Paint, maybe. I don’t know. I never disturbed her in her studio. I know the things that came out of it had at least a tinge of cheerfulness in them. Even the ones that didn’t were meditative, at least, like when you have a day where you don’t have to do anything and you’re not in a hurry and you actually let yourself stare at something long enough to see it. One of my favorite paintings of hers, which must have been one of hers and Dad’s favorites, too, because she displayed it in his study instead of selling it for the sizable offer she’d received for it, reminded me of a tree I could see from my dorm window. It had this one branch that stuck out about a foot further than the rest and in a light breeze, it would look like it was a hand waving a friendly hello that lasted an hour. A lot of her paintings seemed to be like that. She somehow seemed to get the wave through on an immobile canvas. Nothing would move, but you still got that same feeling you would if you were watching it happen.
That wasn’t my only favorite thing in the study. What I thought was cute about Dad’s bookshelf wall was that although he had a categorization system that was perfectly logical to him, when I was done with a book, no matter what kind it was, it was to be placed on the lower right bookshelf. (He probably would have had me start at the top, but I was too short to reach.) I loved watching that little tower of read books grow.
I don’t know if he understood me better than I did and tricked me into reading even more than I probably would have just to see my progress, but he’s kept it in that same order ever since. I like looking at it when I visit because it’s a record of what I read and in what order. Mon dieu, I would read anything then. Some really good stuff, some utter crap, some girly stuff (my guilty pleasure was Nancy Drew because she was a little badass who could also solve things with her brain and Dad must have liked them because he kept buying them as fast as I’d read them–hey, wait a minute… You sneaky little–) and a lot of things that if I’d had to ask permission, any sane parent would have said, “Maybe you should wait a while on that one.” I’m not sure a lot of ten-year-olds read The Alchemist, and I know that twelve-year-old me had not a single clue what the hell Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was even supposed to be about. My Kindle has learned that if a book goes on sale for less than three bucks, I’ll probably buy it, so it’s sitting in my folder titled, “Someday definitely,” which is the highest tier. (The others are “Someday probably”, “Someday maybe”, “Someday in my next life”, and “Why did I even buy this?” One of the things I miss most about the freedom of childhood was that everyday was someday then.)
I love this scene. Truly, I do. It’s one of my darlings that, as the overused and misunderstood writing advice says, might be murdered.
If it is, it won’t end up a corpse to be buried, left to rot, then forgotten. From that soaked cloth of prose I wrung a poem. As in the original post, it came from all the writing I did up to that point, but unlike the description of the poker table, the sentence I came up with was one I really liked (“One of the things I miss most about the freedom of childhood was that everyday was someday then”), but doesn’t fit in with the point of the scene, which was merely to move Eileen from her room to the study to watching her mother play piano on a peaceful Sunday.
Threads
When I was the age my child is now,
My father made me read
Not by might or by main
Only a silent nudge.
His huge beloved bookcase–
Well worn, wood oak–
Was meticulous and bountiful:
The heart of the house
And just as well guarded.
I had to read then, not for him but for me.
Any doubloon in his treasure was mine–
On one condition.
When I finished, it went back not where I got it,
Not where he’d pondered the perfect place for it.
It went at the bottom right, a chest of my own.
So from nine to nineteen, through the map of his heart
Spooled a thread of my own, longer each day.
Some good books, some trash, some beyond my years.
It grew as I did, none too high, but none below me.
I’m at the age he was then, but not so wise.
I have four folders now, books labeled
Someday Definitely, Someday Probably,
Someday Maybe, Why Did I Even Buy This?
Back then, every day was someday.
So that scene, even if it never sees daylight, wasn’t wasted. It led me to this poem. I don’t write poetry—at least, I never set out to—so I would never have come to this without writing something I may never use.
Feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you think. Were they both good? Both terrible? Did you like one and not the other?
I'd love to hear from you!