Tuesday, June 30, 2009
I want the green Play-doh!
This business of writing is messy stuff. Before I always thought that writing was the formal, neat aspect of English/Language Arts and reading literature was the messy, get outta my way, I'm searching for meaning stuff. But writing should be messy. Instead of starting with a bowl and trying to fill it with stuff, we should think of writing as a the clay we want to make the bowl with. Actually, we should use Play-doh to make our bowl--that way we can always add or take away from it. Better yet, we can roll it back up in a ball and start again.
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Great analogy, Bobbi! I need to embrace the messy more to get where I'm going, and I'm learning to take comfort in revision instead of feeling like it's a failure. Sometimes you just need to roll it back up and start over!
ReplyDeleteBobbi, like Anna, I, too, love the metaphor. For some reason, you made me think of my trips to the Four Corners region of the desert southwest, where I walk out on nameless mesas and find shards of Anasazi pottery. I am seeing these now as fragments of stories that I long to read, stories that can no longer be revised . You inspired me to keep working my life story and the written sections thereof, to keep that Play-doh moist so that I can put it back in the can and pull it out to work with again tomorow...and tomorrow...and tomorrow. Time enough to fire it in the kiln that cremates my remains when this life is over. It will become shards eventually, too---and I hope there are homo sapiens then as now who can bend down, finger the lone piece of my pottery story, and wonder about me, too.
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