Shitty first drafts as in fingers banging on keys and hitting the wrong notes and sounds coming out funny and twisted, a moo, a fart, a pinched expression between my eyes. Everything blank. My face white. The shortcomings of my soul about to be revealed that I am a small, insecure, shitty human being. Why would I want the world to know that?
So I go into bluster, brandish my sword, metal glinting in the sunlight, as I chop through the underbrush, cut back vines, rip out weeds, mow the great expanse of grass into lawn, and make. . . .bonsai! See the pretty ornamental shapes and pretty words and pretty sentences and pretty paragraphs and pretty chapters. And isn’t the book cover pretty, too? And how about the title? Everything in its pretty place.
Look, I’m a writer, my bonsai whispers.
And then I scream. I cannot prune my soul that is growing in all directions, a dense forest, into a tiny, pretty ball. The whole world spills over in my body. How do I attempt to describe the contents moving like endless waves on a battered shore?
Forget writing myself whole. I’m already in the hole. I’ve already lost half my audience before I even begin, and well, I’ll lose the next 49% on the first page, and the other 1% that stick around, what exactly will they get out of staying with me to the end? A bunch of nonsense masquerading as wisdom, new age talk, phony inspiration, or drumroll. . .heartbreak, and let’s face it, who needs more heartbreak?
Why would anyone like to read about my heartbreak, my dreams? Does the 18th iteration of a Dear Mom letter begging for forgiveness that sits in my drafts folder before being deleted matter to you? Do you want to hear about the twinge of guilt every time I kill a mosquito between my hands? Do you want to know about the time I lay in a hospital in Varanasi with poison spreading through my body from the bite of a mosquito as dengue fever gripped my joints and split my head, sweat pouring out of every pore, left for dead, brought back to life by the kindness of strangers who donated their blood? As I contemplated my mortality, unable to move my fingers, rash all over my body, a holy presence whispered in my ear, sing. So I sing, my voice lifted to the rafters, an angel amongst all my demons.
One shitty, pretty word at a time, I tell the truth of my life.