'Scouring' Your Writing: A Rambling Nightmare

I sanded down my oven hood last Saturday.

I spent an hour, with bleach and a metal scrubber, scouring it up, and slowly brought it back to it's original gleam. While it was happening, I thought my oven hood was bronze. In my stupid mind, I was in a secret garden moment, 'It's been bronze all this time!" Like when people remove their carpet and find wood floors underneath. But it wasn't bronze, I was scrubbing down the sealant because I'm an idiot. And now I need to buy new sealant for the oven hood.

But it turns out this is an excellent metaphor for a book thrown aside. IG: When you are working on a project that isn't going anywhere, you may find beauty underneath. Or, you may find that it's all crap and you've wasted the last year (or hour) scrubbing away the filth to find you have broken down the core of the project, (the base metal), and it's a bad idea.

Now, this would be the time to give up and say, "This is the worst, I'm an idiot." (I can relate) or you realize it's potential. When the sealant is gone, you can put a new sealant on the hood. Now, your hood is clean, and it looks brand NEW! SHINY!

(Yes, this is a metaphor based on my idiocy, but it's a good one, stay with me.)

If you clean out your original copy, get rid of what isn't working (grease, in this case), and then you can "paint on" what does work. You can start anew.

My point: Don't completely give up on a idea you believe in. Learn from your mistakes.

I'm all for redoing your failures. Finding what doesn't work and working HARD to insert what does. Delete and clean your first dream. You never know, what was once stupid and irrelevant has about 30 years to come back around. If fashion is a good timetable to base trends on -- Which, it is -- We can learn a lot from what came back around ten years ago. What was dead in the 80's because it was "overdone," was (past tense, thank god) "back in style" in the early 2000's (Here, I would talk about how 90's stuff is back in right now, but I think that three 90's references in three posts in a row is pretty ridiculous).

What was once a sad remake could now be a genius retelling. Take stories from the 70's and rewrite them, better, with your years of improved talent. Or, look at the early 2000's, that's coming around in ten years. 

Now, you could be me, and scrub down the sealant and end up with what I did: A piece of crap. It could very well be a waste of your time.

Or you could scrub down an idea, make it relevant with your new skills and try again with the new version. You may find that everything you had written was great, but it needed a brush up. You could re-create an idea and make it as amazing as you once imagined. You could be creating a masterpiece.

As an architect friend of mine once said, "Nothing gets erased. I could draw five houses, and the client only wants the one that's chosen."

But that's the point. What isn't chosen doesn't mean its a bad idea, but that it's wrong for that client. You can rewrite it to be right. It's all about revision. It's about re-imagining what didn't work.

Remake your old failures.

But only after you're out of new ideas. Don't waste the wealth of inspiration.


All my love,
L.B.