To my chagrin, this month’s blog started with a blank page. Usually I jot material that didn’t get used the month before into a new document. To which I’ll add ideas as they occur to me. That way, when I sit down to draft the blog in earnest, preliminary material is waiting to be shaped.
But this month, the first month of the new year, there was no waiting document titled January 2025, no preliminary words to consider, no potential energy on the page. This month on January 12th, I started with a blank page, which can be a little disheartening but look—already it isn’t blank. Sometimes the problem can become part of the solution.
Three paragraphs in and I’m finding joy in this not-quite blank page. In starting and restarting sentences, shifting meaning mid-sentence, embracing a topic, letting another spin off into orbit. I’m turning this blank page into a discovery draft, a term I prefer to shitty first draft, though I get the comfort in declaring—yes I know this isn’t good yet, it’s shitty. But isn’t that a given?
Think of music, dancing, acting. There is the learning of something new, the practicing, practicing, practicing before the song, the dance, the play is ready for a public performance. Do artists in those fields declare their practicing shitty? Perhaps they do. But do they declare those shitty first practices are evidence that they are not really musicians, dancers, or actors? Or is that the special hell of writers?
I recently listened to Samatha Harvey’s Orbital, a short novel about six astronauts on the space station structured around the 16 orbital sunrises that occur in a 24-hour period. This is a gorgeous novel with language that propels you out of the atmosphere so you can gaze back at planet Earth, our one and only home. That language also tethers us to that home, to flaws, to cracks in the surface that are holding for now but someday will give way.
After a discouraging day of writing or life, I’ll tell myself: Tomorrow is a new day. The dawn will offer a fresh start. Not unlike a blank page. Not unlike revising my way to the next draft, a fresh version. Revising is practicing, and practicing is engaging with our art. What a gift to spend time doing art, something more akin, mostly but not always, to heaven than hell.
I imagine myself in the space station, gazing down at what my Armenian grandmother Matilda called the tiny beautiful jewel of a planet, watching the sunrise and engaging with the blank page, the next draft, 16 times a day a welcoming, an embracing of the writerly path I am on.
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WIP Update: This month marks five years since I started my Armenian Family Memoir. I’m on both the zillionth draft of this material and the first draft of a book-length manuscript. My goal is to have a complete draft done by the end of this June.
Laura, I started to write a reply to your piece. Nothing I wrote about each paragraph made any sense … blank page; nothing but shitty first drafts. But look, two sentences already!
And already I’m reminded of plenty of lousy musical rehearsals, as recently as a couple of weeks ago. And we weren’t going to get any 16 trips aroound the sun before the performance. (Okay, I made that last part up. Performance, standing O.)
These days, where else can I look other than to making music to honor this tiny jewel of a planet. Oh, and reading thoughtful and well-written prose like yours … embracing your and others’ writerly paths. It’s the world these days that’s shitty.
~ Dick
Dick, your reply is lovely. Keep making music, my friend.
I like the term discovery draft. It reminds me of the phrase becoming, which we are all working on daily.
Yes! Becoming, the ongoingness of it all.
Good luck with your goal. I’m sure you’ll keep at it.
Thanks!