All the Work I've Abandoned

I like decking my walls in plot maps and revision charts and progress calendars and all sorts of other writing paraphernalia that I never actually use but that make my writing space feel properly cluttered. Taking these decorations down is usually something triumphant, a mark that I’ve finished writing or editing a novel and am ready to move on to something new. But a couple minutes ago I took down my collection of messy and useless paper, and for once it wasn’t triumphant at all. Relieving, a little bit, but mostly sad that I’d abandoned something I’d spent a year and a half, four major drafts (comprised of twelve minor ones), and a whole lot of brainpower on. 

I won’t tell you too much about the exact nature of the project, except that it was a full-length movie I planned to film in Grinnell over fall break this year. None of the writing projects that I’ve let go have ever felt this permanent before. Usually I just take a day off, fully intending to come back to it tomorrow, but then by tomorrow I have some other idea and follow that instead. Or, more often, I write a terrible ending just so I can say that I’ve finished it, then leave it to rot in my hard drive. But this abandonment feels real. Fall break will pass, and then the rest of the year, and once I’m not a student anymore I doubt I’ll have an opportunity to film scenes written for specific dorms and academic buildings. 

Granted, I never really had an opportunity to film those scenes in the first place. I found out that my script didn’t have a prayer when I showed it to some friends with actual experience in theater and filmmaking, who told me that making this, as a full-time student, with a cast and crew of full-time students, with no budget, allowing for only seven days of shooting, would be asking one miracle too many. I guess I never really thought of it like that, I was just seeing the end of each new draft as its own triumph and hoping that people who knew what they were doing would take over once I was done writing. In a way, it really makes me appreciate the simplicity of writing: that a story, created by a single person with as little as a twenty-cent pen and a dollar notebook, could be as captivating as a movie which might take the population and economy of a mid-sized town to make. Still, I made this project to make the most of its medium, playing with effects that couldn’t be done in any other medium. And now that I find out that the medium is too expensive and time-consuming for anyone without funds to do much with (which really should’ve been obvious from the start), I don’t know what to do with all the paper I generated, all the ideas I poured into this. 

But I shouldn’t give myself too much of a pity party. After all, yesterday my fiction professor went on a little self-deprecating monologue about how writing is perhaps the worst per-hour work there is. Apparently he’s written thousands of pages that are beyond salvaging, four entire novels that he’s scrapped entirely. Granted, publishing three out of a total seven is very good, especially if you consider that I’m standing at a score of zero-to-six right now (not counting novellas, short stories, scripts, etc.) but I think he’s getting at something larger about the work of writing. I spent three months and hundreds of hours on my first novel, and writing the last couple words felt like standing on top of a tower I’d built from nothing and getting dizzy from the height. Then three days later the tower collapsed when I skimmed through what I’d written and deemed it all garbage. So I built another tower on top of the ruins of the first, and got a good long look before it collapsed too. After writing every night for five years now, I like to think that my towers don’t collapse much anymore, just shatter and wobble a little bit. But, if I have to be honest with myself, every first draft I’ve ever done is a tower in pieces. If I took this same strategy to civil engineering, I’d probably be in prison for gross negligence by now. At the very least, I’ve probably got something clinical for thinking that my next tower will stand on its own next time when I consider my track record. But I have to believe that in my next story I’ll have the right tact and get the damn thing to work for once. Because reasonable expectations are poison to a creative writer. And I’ve heard that, if you apply the same faulty formula over and over and over again, sooner or later it’s bound to work.