In which I worry I don’t know how to revise

Last week I combed through more than a decade of Google and Word docs.

I found snippets of essays, exercises written in workshops, second drafts of pieces that never found a final form. Some were pleasant surprises, reminders of ideas that felt brilliant at the time. Some I’d forgotten writing entirely. 

(That’s the thing about the medium of writing – half-finished paintings lean against walls or stare at you from their stacks on shelves, whereas pages upon pages of words can easily hide in files on hardrives or in the cloud. At least half-finished paintings and crochet projects exist in my physical reality to remind me of their continued existence. It feels easier to accidentally leave writing to rot in whatever way data points decompose, which is to say never and sometimes all at once.)

There are pieces I’ve tried to return to, that I continually find aren’t ready to be written. Some scraps of paragraphs never got a chance to live – seeds that I realize existed but never planted. 

I’m not sure I know how to tell if a half-wrtitten essay is worth resurrecting. If a flash of images is capable of being something more. If a narrative I first conceived of years ago would still ring true to me in the present. Sometimes it feels like essays come with a timer, like the writing must happen in the moment, the piece polished and finished then and there. Before the “I” changes too much, the perspective shifts, the mirror reveals something new. I’m not sure if any of this makes sense. 

Last week I printed fifty pages of work that, for lack of a better term, sparked some kind of joy. Work that, for some reason or another, was abandoned. That never arrived in a “final” form, never got submitted to any kind of publication. But it is work that contains something that feels, even now, worthy of articulation. 

I started revisions on a short short piece of nonfiction that I originally wrote in a poetry workshop four years ago. I have no idea if it will survive the translation from verse to prose, or if everything I’m adding to it now will dampen the glimmer of it. I’m worried I’ll ruin it during the revision process (not that it was something that could be ruined to begin with). I’m anxious that I somehow missed the part where I was supposed to learn how to revise in the first place. I might not know when to stop – might take it too far or else not far enough.

Somehow, I’m determined to figure out how to get this small collection of words to a place that feels, at least for the time being, like an arrival, a finish-line. Even if I’m unsure what that feels like. Unsure I’ve ever, truly, felt like a piece was done done.