From the archive: written in 2014, a few weeks after my honeymoon, when I deleted years of old poems and stories to start over. Still the hardest writing advice I’ve ever followed — and the best.
I just returned from my honeymoon, and the trip helped reawaken the artistic spirit. Paris and Barcelona were an inspiration — but now that I have had this great revelation, or reawakening, what the hell does that mean? Yes, I have a new profound interest in photography, and I’m rededicated to writing stories, poetry, and other creative projects in the small amount of free time that I actually have. But what’s the goal? What’s the plan? How do I ensure that the revelations I had during my honeymoon don’t become a faded-out dream, like an old photo of a friend I’ve stashed in a box underneath my bed and pulled out years later only to say: “Oh yes, I remember him.”
Kill your darlings
The first step is the hardest: kill your darlings. When I left graduate school and moved to California, I had a bunch of writing — a novel in stories and a collection of poetry — and I truly believed in these pieces. Some of them have been published; others have not. So after some difficult examination — and yes, a four-year opportunity to reflect — I’ve decided it’s time to move on. I went back into my collection of poetry and just started deleting poem after poem (keeping some), realizing that I must start over. My novel in stories: well, I’m not even going to look at that for a bit, but try to reimagine the themes and the stories new. For now, they’re in the trash.
This has been incredibly difficult, and it’s the artistic equivalent of having an identity crisis. Basically, I’m trying to define what I hope to look and feel and sound like through my writing, and I’m going through the painful act of destroying the old parts that don’t seem to work anymore. As if I’m throwing the digital strips of my past into the furnace, I can hear a voice calling out to be saved. I want to reach into the digital fire and save them — it’s so easy to recover deleted documents in the internet age — but I have to admit that my writing wasn’t working the way I wanted it to. That’s not easy.
I’m thinking of something I heard about Franz Kafka right before he died. He was on his deathbed, and he asked his friends to burn all his manuscripts and his journals. Of course, his friend didn’t listen, and published them anyway. I wonder if I would have the courage, if none of my work was actually backed up anywhere, to throw an entire manuscript in the fire, to watch it burn and become ash, to watch a part of myself disappear.
Look at it from another angle
There is something else I learned about the act of changing a creative project, and the lesson presented itself through photography and journalism. The photo above was taken on Bastille Day in front of the Eiffel Tower — the most amazing fireworks display I had ever seen. Sorry, America. The fireworks were shooting straight out of the tower, timed to accent the rhythms of the music being pumped into the air. Even the colors matched moods in the music. But I was having a very difficult time photographing it: no tripod, couldn’t keep steady enough to hold the shutter open and still capture crisp shots. So I pumped up the ISO. The photos came out decent but noisy — not the quality I wanted. So I decided to just look at the photo differently, and I cropped it, and suddenly the fireworks looked like pieces of wheat growing out of a steel earth.
This is a skill I learned as a journalist: how to approach the story from different angles depending on the information you have at hand, or the direction you want the story to go. It’s something I’m taking into my creative life. How can I look at the work I’m creating from the appropriate vantage point? A different angle can mean something incredibly large — or just a slight variation. I have dozens of stories, dozens of journal entries, countless scenic sketches, hundreds of ideas — now it’s about finding the right angle to breathe life into the process. I’m thinking about an interview I conducted with a photographer named King Lawrence. He said: anyone can take a picture, but it’s the idea behind it that counts.
Finding a voice
Finally, after all of this tearing up and destroying the old pieces of writing, I’m starting fresh and searching to finally define my voice. I’ve always felt I had a pretty strong sense of my identity as a writer, but I’ve realized that I don’t. I need to keep on finding my voice — the vehicle for the stories that I need to tell. I’ve been traveling a lot since I was 17. I’ve lived in Detroit, Bradenton, Miami, DeLand, Long Beach, Los Angeles, some time in Europe, and each place keeps changing me drastically. But my hometown — Clinton, Mass — is where I was raised. In my work, I call it Kilroy, but I need to return to my roots a bit. I need to set some stories in the place where my voice was initially crafted. And I need to spend some time in one place artistically, finding a true sense, an authenticity, to speak again, to write, to create. That’s my plan of action.
— Joe
