What to do with the leftovers?
GO DIE. AND EAT IT.
Recently, my dear friend Laura hosted a poetry collage workshop. This is the second one she has chaperoned (let’s face it, we’re all babies with scissors) that I have sat in on, and I came away with something so incredibly saga for my scribbling. These I probably already knew, but got some serious reframing. What do I do with all these words I have?
Don’t be so precious.
At the first workshop, some of us collected our cutouts from all the fashion magazines, comics, and artist book copies then sat there looking confounded. The internal confusion, “Where do I start? Do I even have a substantial amount of words? What order could they even be put in? What am I trying to contrive?”
Laura, with brilliant confidence, says, “Stop being so precious with your words! Or you’ll never get anywhere!” — mind you, I could be paraphrasing here. But, this concept is so correct. If we don’t start configuring the work, beginning to openly craft through chaos, we’ll never get something of substance, the desired. Fraught is the fear of failure path. So, as the popular literary phrase states, we must kill that darling — GO DIE.
How simply easy it is to forget something like this that we’ve always known. This led me to the next suggestion snippet:
Take your leftovers with you. Save them for next time.
Laura, a seasoned collage collector, has a small see-through pouch she received from the dentist's office in which she keeps all her scraps. The leftovers from all the cutting, the precious words we scavenged for and now covet.
At the end of the second workshop session, I stared at the colorful words and greyscale images with sadness; how do I literally throw away these darlings? Of course, Laura knew the solution, you don’t; you save. Just because it couldn’t be used in this very second doesn’t render that something useless for the future — EAT IT.
To quote one of the last lines in the TV show, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, “Being a coward is only cute in the Wizard of Oz.”
Ultimately, we should rush into the creative clutter and disrobe our self-doubt, and find our creation confidence. It will be stunning. GO DIE AND EAT IT.