Ghosts of ideas gone by
Reduce, reuse and recycle
I’m not sure how frequently I think about the Roman Empire, but I think often about ideas gone by, one that never came to pass. Some of them still linger. Maybe one day they’ll make it! Plucked from the shelf in my mind, dusted off ready to be worked on again. It usually doesn’t work like that. Once you fall out of flow with something it’s near impossible to coax it back again, to get it to where it once was.
When we have a bad idea we like to just get rid. This goes for literally anything, not just writing. A top we’ve bought and now decided is ugly. A meal we cooked and didn’t like. Drawings gone wrong screwed and scrunched up into a paper ball. Straight into the bin it goes. We hack it all off like a bad haircut and end up with nothing left to show for all the time, work and effort we put in. I suppose we are a bit more conscious when it comes to disregarding some things. Maybe you’ll donate that top, put the meal in the food bin or recycle the paper drawings. We’re better in those areas. Why not with our writing?
I think it’s painful. I mean literally, physically, gut wrenchingly painful to look at pieces of work that didn’t work and think about how to recycle it. To pull it apart and repackage little snippets. Saving what can be repurposed and giving it a new lease of life. As much as I’m a supporter of rescuing whatever can be saved, maybe sometimes completely letting go is the best course of action.
recently interviewed Caroline O’Donoghue, best selling author and Podcast extraordinaire. The Rachel Incident, Caroline’s most recent novel published a few months ago, is on the back of a previous book getting scrapped. As Emma said, “it’s a brave thing to let go of something that doesn’t feel like it’s working for whatever reason”.I’ve often found myself getting the fear with bigger ideas. I’ll reach a point of writing or researching and then hit the point where I know I’ll be devastated if it doesn’t work out from here. I mean even getting over the hurdle of starting Drafting and publishing anything at all out there into the universe was a huge step for me. Because I had such a backlog of stuff - notes, scribbles, thoughts, poems, writing - a lot of my newsletters were once earlier versions of something else. Edited, tweaked and moulded into something new. My words are like clay. I am Demi Moore. This is Ghost.
I thought it would be funny to talk about some of the ideas that live rent free in my brain, having not (yet, anyway) found a permanent residency.
I wrote down this one idea in my notes and it’s been there for years. I just looked on my phone and the note is from November 2016. Wow, that thing has survived many iCloud backups and transfers to new phones. Kudos. Anyway, the idea was for a building called The Writer’s Block. I still sort of like it. The pun makes me laugh. I was funny at 21. The building would be a publishing house and also have a huge library and lots of communal spaces for writers to come together. There’s a cult element about it I quite enjoy as well. Like, maybe we’d all live in this place and stay there forever? Feel like I need to hit up Anna Delvey, we’ve got a very similar train of thought here. Might pitch it to her since her whole foundation thing went tits up.
There’s also an idea for an animated film, definitely one that Disney would pick up, about a hotel. There would be a little girl (there’s always a little girl) whose parents own and run the hotel and perhaps it was struggling and she wanted to help them get business booming again. She has a lot of business acumen, this girl. She’d turn to the sentient palm trees for help. Obviously, they’d be able to talk and they’d help her. Something like that. Does that film already exist? If so let me know so I can sue them. Anyway if this one does actually become a Pixar best-seller I promise to hold a launch party and you’re all invited. I’ll even sign your Blu-ray.