Occasionally I’ll look through the posts on my site and I’ll see the ones I’ve abandoned. It’s usually for different reasons. A couple of them are actually story ideas that I needed to jot down, so I threw a post about them in a permanent draft, never to see the light of day on the Interwebz. A couple more of the limbo posts were specific to the time they were first written and if I had posted them way-back-then, it might have made sense at the time. Now they’re dated and only make sense to me.
Still, the others are usually posts that I reconsider, step back from to take a breath (rants, generally), or some are just some free thinking on a couple of topics I found interesting. The last example is a lot like my writing compost pile I have in a drawer–a physical manifestation of brainstorming jotted down on legal pads, scraps of paper, old receipts. Ideas, jammed together, given room and time to see if they will bear any fruit. Some times it smells.
No, not really. Just kidding about that last one. But some of the goofy writing I’ve got in that pile will make you scrunch your nose up as if you had just stepped in something foul.
There are a couple of posts I’ve started where I find out a couple of sentences into the piece that I don’t know how to write about that particular topic. Take for example a draft I had titled Impending Fatherhood; This was before Audrey was born and I wanted to write down how I was feeling. Thing was, Audrey was here before I finished it and I’m glad it worked out that way. I look at it now, a post not even three weeks old and the single line I did manage to put down is wrong. The wrong angle, the wrong feeling and a general sense of self-importance where it really wasn’t appropriate. Every single word was wrong and the title itself took on a Hindenburg-like quality; looks good at the beginning, but in the end, a huge problem. In the moments after Audrey’s birth, the motivation to describe my feelings before it no longer had any weight, no longer seemed important to share or even explore. The post died on the vine.
I had a similar thought when I wanted to talk about friendship. You might remember in a somewhat recent post that I mentioned that I was lonely. Shortly after the post, I began to get phone calls and emails on friends “just checking up” on me. Either it was serendipity, or people thought it might be nice to drop a line. Regardless, I was deeply touched. I wanted to write about it, but I found I was getting too sentimental. What I should have done is just post thank you in big, bold letters to everyone and left it at that because there wasn’t much else to say. I left it as another unfinished draft. Thinking about it, how can you really put into words in a blog post about what your friends and family mean to you? Much more appropriate for a book (maybe) or poetry.
Over time, I’m sure the number of posts will grow and maybe I’ll use a snippet here or an idea there, but a good writing compost is a good idea. If nothing else, it’s nice to see ideas grow and evolve.
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