A Mirror That Doesn't Answer

A first draft should be the last draft. Wishful thinking. Writing a second, a third, even a fourth is torture.

Can we think of writing drafts as reflective, an answer to creative questions needed to complete a novel or essay? Maybe. When time is painstaking, a draft perishes.

Whenever you get a break, take a look at your first draft. Is it really without mistakes? If so how many? Are their ideas or some takeaways you can build from? Whatever the case just take a look without judgement. Do not read too much into it. Look. Stare.

As an exercise, I imagine holding my draft up to the mirror (This can be done in real time) with in mind some ideas of what's needed to move my writing forward. Observing the draft's reflection I look for answers embedded with self and the space I share at present, whether a bathroom, bedroom, living room etc.

To me drafts are not perishable things rather the need to reshape, refine, with the help of things that's around me. This when a draft is imperishable. If thrown in the wind it would never depart. Instead it would return in strains and waves depending on where you are on your writing journey.

Reflection becomes prevalent. Power constructs paths known but unknown to a story's need. The possibility may seem meticulously mundane. But that's the thing. Life itself is carefully shaped with many parts and probabilities. The mundane is a capable imaginative process to perceive life's inapt parts. It is the ladder that makes a story worth reading. A piece of life shared to the world even the unknown language of the air, we tend to think She has no existence but we share the same omniscience.

A reflection is not just mirrored images. It's shared space with time that bends, an art waiting to be manifested by the air space we devalue.

When reflection doesn't answer it's because we dismiss the mundane as an imaginative exercise. I would even go beyond and say it's a way of life. For the unimaginative being, respectfully, lacks creativity the animated building block to existence.

The mundane, then, is pious to our lives: air and space answers the question of how we move in shared spaces, while at the same time teaches us to refine and not perish.