Early drafts don't look like gold but they are

be kind when you speak of pages written in the early days of duress

“It isn’t that the writing quality wasn’t good then; it was just too soon.”

Alchemy at its simplest and more suitably to my purposes, is the process of distillation. The most illustrative and meaningful writing content is distilled from the drafts that went before it. The gold is distilled from the substance you began with…

My client G wrote whenever she could in the days and weeks following her painful loss. She wrote about the morning routine, her listless movements, and her numb reliance on the basics of eating, sleeping and watching the news to mark her days. She wrote about that then. Each of us that has felt the paralysis of grief’s early days, felt the unconscious putting of one foot in front of the other, and can relate to what G wrote then. But now, years later in her memoir G might only include a few sentences from those grieving first days. She’s made meaning of that time and the prevalence of an endurance message guides her writing now. But without the writing from those agonizing first days, she wouldn’t have the illustration of breakfasts eaten alone in front of the tv to offer her curious reader for relatability.

Another memoirist A, has waited a decade to understand the events in those hellish days when as a young woman she bore the responsibility of her father’s last wishes. Still another wonderful writer N goes back to her journals and rereads notes about conversations with police from the time after she got the call that her sibling had died. They consider the busy days, boredom of the routine, or the horror of begging for details as less than mediocre writing, denigrating with words like “only”, “senseless” or “embarrassing”. It may not even have appeared as prose. Early writing would have been lists, disconnected jottings and not fluid, well-conceived story-making. But that early work was essential.

Now as they each progress deeply into their gorgeous manuscripts, those details are foundational aspects to their experience. In my forthcoming book, Elements, I speak about the EARTH work in our life writing. Early drafts are often more literal than literary—they illustrate experience, lives lived and feelings felt. That was all the writer could manage then, but it was essential. Demanding more or better from ourselves is for naught—writing too early dilutes the power of the process of content pulling, curation, distillation and meaning making.

What was too early to be more than jottings then, is content gold now.

Does this remind you of something you had to cut from a final draft? Leave me a comment if you’d like to share…

photo credit: Nat Caron Photo, boots by Fluevog, coat by Rock N’ Karma and the clutch is my own creation.