What Are Words Worth?

This blog isn't necessarily going to be all about prancing about the countryside with a daisy behind my ear being poetical, but as I claim to be a poet I suppose I should at least start with a post about poetry and writing.

So, today, I'd like to congratulate a friend who took part in NaNoWriMo this year and made his 50,000 words yesterday: "Well done on achieving that inaugural NaNo!"  This means that he has most, if not all, of the first draft on his first novel under his belt and I am so pleased for him.  Having been privileged to read extracts along the way, I'm now desperate to read the entire book and to see it published.

It has been fascinating to observe the growth and development of this work.  It certainly isn't the book he started out to write.  That hit if not the skids, then certainly the doldrums several months back.  The book that's emerged started life really as a distraction from, I think, the frustration of trying to make 'the' novel work and failing to find the inspiration, or to (then) identify the block(s).  Seeing the current novel emerge from a promising, if brief, genesis as a piece of Flash Fiction has been really interesting.

Not always, but quite regularly, when I set out to write a poem what I end up with is not necessarily what I set out to produce.  Elements may be the same, but what appears on the page can be quite different from what was in my head.  That doesn't necessarily mean it's better or worse than the idea that was originally conceived (although it can be), just different.  Often in ways that surprise me. And I think, from sitting on the margins observing my friend write his novel, he has had a very similar experience although, obviously, as his medium and mine are different, not an identical one.  But one, certainly, that I can identify with.

It is really reassuring to 'know', albeit through vicarious experience, that at least one other person has the same kind of experience when writing that I do.  Of course I'm aware that it happens to others but somehow it hasn't quite hit home until now.  It's the old training saw: "I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do, I understand" in literary terms.  Or, perhaps more grandly, it's the force and value of the empirical experience over the declarative.  Either way, I've valued the insight.

The gestation of a poem is a curious thing.  I have several poems in my head and in my notebook at the moment that are waiting their turn to see the light of day.  One has been there for over 20 years, another for a year or so, another turned up just a couple of weeks ago.  I know what it is I want to say with all of them.  Or, at least, I think I know and I have a curiosity to see how they might turn out on the page.  When their times come, I wonder how far from the original concept they will have grown.