“FINISHING THE UNFINISHED” By Mike Cohen

I don’t want to enter my writing studio any more. Shards of scribbled screed like broken pottery cover the floor corner to corner. The place looks like a china shop after a bull stampede. I’d need a pair of high ankle mountain boots if I tried to set foot among the crumpled compositions scattered everywhere. There are busted story pots, broken poetry urns, splintered essay vases, and fractured novel crockeries. Failed efforts abound.

With regret I have retreated to the kitchen where my writing routine is conducted in a makeshift workshop of piled pillows to sit on in front of a TV tray atop of which a blank page stare at me.

  Sigh. I have to face it; this is not like composing at my desk. But pushing my studio door open and seeing it strewn with the detritus from hundreds of hours of ossified jottings, well it’s painful to say the least.

I’m a victim of my own enthusiasms. At first the manic heat of creative energy seems to be an undeserved blessing until spontaneously I feel the story brakes go on. Jerked to a stop, the words on the page become stranded, isolated, the pages spattered with incomprehensible verbal blunders. The randomness of the words are like uncontrolled lava from a volcano.

  SO….. 

Is it possible to return into the studio? Perhaps. Slowly. Carefully.  Try to spot the big chunks. Set them aside in a box (to be examined non judgmentally later. Sweep up the tiny bits – prepositions mostly, here and there a wasted adverb, or an unnecessary conjunction. Those should be tossed away. They are not recyclable. Bring out the stain remover to clean off the cliches soaking into the carpet. After a bit of scrubbing, it might be possible to return the writing space as if the mess was never there, as if to start anew.

But before that….

Why not put on some latex gloves (non allergenic) and pick through the box? Perhaps the fragments will present themselves clearer than than they did when they were first crafted on the verbal pottery wheel with all that distracting wet sludge flying around and the keyboard left sticky. After all, some date back  twenty years or so. Perhaps dimmer eyes and a slower brain can tenaciously examine them for diamonds in the rough waiting to be discovered.

O.k., some mistakes continue remain forgettable. But perhaps one character, though mummified, may still speak with some authenticity and self awareness, albeit delayed. After all, behavior that may have been dismissed as a fatal flaw two decades ago, might occur today as all too human. And some characters may fit better in some other incomplete story. A roving protagonist might well be looking for a worthy and formable adversary.

Perhaps one piece will turn out to be a surprise find. An unsculpted edge may reveal the nerves, sinews, and bone of an overlooked tale with hints of irony, crisis, or maybe love gained or lost. Perhaps one piece of prose will expose a funny bone that time has picked clean of mystery meat. Post cataract eyes and newly installed lenses might now illuminate an overlooked narrative that had been in plain sight all along. Why not look now?