My first three novels were written long, long before the age of the internet. I could not simply delete them with the stroke of a key. I am glad for this because I was forced to create a ritual out of the destruction of those works.
I built a bonfire. I was living in Southern California at the time and it is not as easy and legal to build a bonfire there as one might think. It was actually more like a campfire than a bonfire. But it was big enough to feed the typewritten manuscript pages of my first two novels one by one into the fire.
It took a couple of hours. The manuscript for the first novel was over two inches thick. I could have thrown the whole thing into the fire but that would have taken the joyous ritual out of it. I spent a lot of time on each of those pages and to honor that I needed to release each page individually.
It is the best thing I ever did for the sake of my writing. It was a profound catharsis, an intense purge, an extreme act of freeing myself. Those novels were written by ego and by burning them I was releasing my ego from its self-assigned position as writer and editor….. or so I thought.
And I was freeing myself from ever being able to go back over them wondering, forever wondering, if they could be re-written and made better. I was releasing the past, allowing my focus to stay in the present with one eye to the future.
I then wrote a third novel and a few years later fed it, too, into a bonfire. I am so glad those first three novels no longer exist in any form. They cannot, in any way, weigh me down. The lessons I learned were in the writing of them, not in the actual words. Words are ephemeral. Just ask any fire.
Nowadays if I want to burn any of my novels I would have to throw my laptop into the fire. There would be no joy in that and it would surely be very stinky and toxic to do so.
Sometimes I think of those Tibetan Buddhist monks who spend weeks creating elaborate sand mandalas. Once their creation is done they sweep the sand around and it disappears forever. Sadly, I am not so enlightened as those monks seem to be.
While I can sometimes disengage from the ego in order to become an empty vessel through which a story may come forth, when the story is finished my ego wants to hold the finished product in its grimy little hands and use it to puff itself up. It becomes proof of identity. It becomes validation. Further validation comes through the act of publishing. Once published, there are copies “out there” and it becomes impossible to burn them all.
And then we become burdened with our published works and the expectations we have engendered in our readers. It becomes harder to venture into new directions. The empty vessel becomes more difficult to enter thanks to a puffed up ego.
Writing can really suck. It can also be an orgasmic act of pure joy. Thank God for fires.
