Trail of Discarded Prose

My husband has a sixth sense for when I’ve dropped into Revision Hell. Maybe it’s my snippy tone or my random “this is crap” outbursts or just my sullen and vacant look across the room. Nonetheless, he knows when I’m struggling. This past spring, after such an outburst or two, he suggested—no, he demanded—that we get out of the house. He thought we should go on a hike somewhere other than our normal routine. So, he loaded me in the car, refused to tell me where we were going and drove to the other side of the county. We disembarked at the parking lot of the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I knew there was water nearby so how bad could it be? Twenty minutes into the hike I realized how bad it could be. Death was everywhere. Gray skies, piles of gray driftwood, bits of washed-up trash, rocks and pebbles, and discarded concrete post-holes with the rusted pipes still encased. A pebbled walkway that led around the park at the edge of the water revealed a shoreline with dead wood and discarded building materials pushed up by the tide.  Mounds of almost unrecognizable waste.  

Then I noticed something. I started to see growth, green shoots of grass climbing out from the gray. Green vines that snaked up otherwise dead trees. Eagle’s nests high atop dead trees, being tended by swirling momma eagles. Water continually pushing nutrients up to the shore.

That’s when I began to rethink revision.

I had been mourning all the words I’d created and lost, the sentences I’d structured then tossed, those many paragraphs that had been pushed to the side by the tide of “revision”. And the time! So much time spent on these words only to discard them in the end. After so many revisions, I’d begun to wonder if my work had evolved or emerged into something wholly different than when I began.

But what I saw now was life. Life emerging. I began to see how the material that looked dead to the naked eye was actually shoring up the river’s shoreline. Was that it? Was the discarded now shoring me up, too? Maybe there was utility in the scrap. Maybe these were the building blocks of nature, of writing. My perspective was changing by how the rejected material (branches, ropes, grass, limbs, rocks) had been used by the momma eagles to build a nest. How the silkworms used leafless branches to weave their pouches. How the pieces became peaceful and whole again.

My husband and I discussed how the large piles of driftwood and discarded scrap might actually have a purpose, to stabilize the shoreline, to serve nature, to create anew. Then, I thanked him for getting me out of the house.

Revision does not have to be hell (although it can easily trap a writer’s mind into a hot funk). Looking closely enough might reveal the green shoots in the rubbish. As with anything, it’s what you choose to see, where you choose to focus, how you choose to emerge from the rubble.