I’m scrapping my book.
Okay, scrap sounds final. Scrape? I’m scraping my book.
A scraped slate.
Tabula rasa.
I’ve been working on my rewrites after a suggested separation and what I found was not what I expected.
When I put my book away at the end of November, I liked it. I was proud of what I wrote. Beginning, middle, end. A real book. By me.
I have a wonderful collection of notes and thoughtful hearts that read and helped me. Watered my seeds and helped me grow. They asked excellent questions that made me wonder about myself and told me where and why they understood my words. But when I began working on it again, I could see it was not what I needed to say.
Not now.
I am still proud of what I wrote. I know I can sit, I can write. I can do the thing.
And I will keep going. It’s okay, I know what the problem is.
I just need to change the whole book.
I realize I still have not explained my experience, and what is missing isn’t a tangible fragment I could slip into a prologue, or add a chapter and move along. This isn’t setting notes and pacing adjustments, this is telling our experience. It is not only where my head was, or even where it is now, but where I want to end up. It’s about where I want us all to end up. It is about why I’m writing. It’s about why this matters— why any of this matters.
I haven’t gone to the real—
—I meant to finish that sentence another way, but you know what— “gone to the real” is close, honestly, that is damn close to accurate.
I haven’t gone to the real. The real inner world I knew, and the world I am learning now, both the internal and external— and my place within them. I am thinking of my automatic responses and which ones I want to replace with new thought patterns. Conscious, chosen considerations.
Who were we before the world put its mistakes and blessings on us? Who are we as raw people? Is that worth knowing? Are we one then? Are we still apart? Do we still fight over paper and earthy secretions?
I am obsessing about the world we should have. I can hear a story from it, I am part of it. But what I wrote down so far is not what we need. It is the same damn gruel I was force-fed. Still. The undoing of the world the past few months has solidified I am not trying to find my way there anymore.
I am going to the real, the raw. The scraped.
I was still puppeting myself, still holding back. Still attempting to farce control over my life instead of letting it be. I edited myself to still fit inside this odd little box, this odd society.
No. That will keep me the same. I am not another regurgitation.
I have yet to let all of me show up and write. No strings. Just me and my words. Truth is not on those pages. Not how it should be. I haven’t allowed visions for the world I want to flourish and exist in a place outside of me, therefore I haven’t let myself flourish and exist. Flourishing is getting harder, I know this. And depending on where you are, existing is impossible. That is why we need artists to capture these moments, the understandings. They are precious, they are fleeting.
And it’s all tethered.
I have been told for too long that I live in a fantasy, a utopia that never—could never exist, and I quite plainly refuse to believe that. Especially if this is the world we have in return: Flour Massacre is a phrase now. And medical debt. School shooter. This is what the world is offering us as far as language now? —Housing crisis.
Complicity, genocide— colonialism, capitalism…? These are the words they put in my head, the words I live under.
And here is me with my small book making sure I don’t upset anyone—
What. The. Fuck?
This is what I mean by “I haven’t gone to the real…”. I have not gone where I am supposed to go. I did that with my years, I will not do that with my writing. I have been analyzing what I am doing with this story and if I send what I have now out into the world I am doing nothing. I am saying nothing new, nothing needed— no questions to ponder. I can do better. I wrote a decent book for the world where the indecent normal we live in remains. That will not be my story.
So I am scrapping it. This world doesn’t need another story like the one I wrote. It needs the one that goes deeper, the one that goes darker. The one that knows there is a story beyond the confines I have been raised within, that I wrote within.
Those confines can be a coffin or a cradle. Either way, I am raising myself up from it.
I can do better.
I can see better now. I think better. I can imagine and build.
I can write.
It is so important to imagine a better world. Let your thoughts run wild with your idealistic dreams of what the world should look like, and let the pain and anger at how it’s not that way flow through you. Let it free your mind and fuel your rage against the machine.
— Aaron Bushnell
FREE PALESTINE
I love your thoughts on writing, Andrea. There's a book draft in my folder as well, one that sounds a lot like yours. I look forward to hearing more about this in person, so soon!
So very much there for this. <3