Just a Draft

It’s just a draft. It’s finished, but not completed. Someone once said of art that a piece is never done, it just ends at an interesting moment. Looking at the draft, I see a piece that’s reached an interesting moment, but there’s so much more to do.

The draft has a beginning, middle and end. It has characters, a plot, and many themes. I should celebrate all of that, but there’s more to the characters than what I’ve written, the plot has more twists and turns than I understand, and I think I know what the story is about, but themes keep showing up and demanding my attention.

I guess this draft has more to teach me than just how to write. Like it, I have a life story that I think I understand. It’s one with twists and turns that leave me questioning my life’s purpose and whether it has a theme at all. There are specific moments in my story when I can look back and see myself as if a character in a novel, but, like those in the draft, I realize there’s more to each of those characters than I’ll ever fully understand - there’s the boy driving away from the hospital with all his father’s possessions in a tied-up garbage bag who wonders how to be a man, the young man who has his son on his lap and no idea what it means to be a father, and the boy putting on a plastic collar in the mirror before his ordination shaking his head in disbelief, and the successful chaplain tripping over his academic robes in England wondering if he’ll ever find his home, to name a few of my characters. You, I’m sure, have many characters of your own. 

Doing the work is not easy. Whether creating a novel or a life, it’s a continuous effort that never ends. It requires showing up, or getting your ass in the chair, as one writer colorfully describes it. We also need a willingness to go where the story and characters lead. There will be interesting moments that allow us to pause , but then there will be more work to do. We’re all works-in-progress, and that can be as frustrating as it can be comforting. 

As I crawl from my therapist’s office, I can at least take comfort in one thing: I’m just a draft. We all are.