Discarding Stubborn Passages Can Be Music To the Muse

I just couldn’t get rid of them. I insisted that it would be like carving out a part of my youth. I just knew I was going to listen to every song in my collection and read the words from the pamphlets one day. I swore that to myself for years.

As those years passed and I listened to music less and less, the urge to just pitch the whole set got stronger and stronger. I looked at them on that top shelf and kept looking at them. I moved three times to different homes and kept them scratch-free. I might just want to look at the colorful pictures enclosed in them one day. Might be ten years from now, but you never know.

But that day never came.

The connection is unbalanced, but my attachment to the things in my closet was like the “things” in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. In the book, O’Brien explores the attachments soldiers make, and how the new identities formed through those attachments can be difficult to overcome. The underlying theme throughout the book is that the emotional “things” soldiers carry with themselves to the warfront and back is a burden that is often heavier on the heart and mind than any gun or helmet.

The same idea can be applied to our lives. We hold on to things so tightly that we inherit a dependence on them. We think that discarding these things will erase our memories of a time and a place that once was, and we’re scared of that. It’s the unknown. It’s the uncertainty. And with each passing year it gets worse, for age disconnects us more and more from youth. What we perceive as a hallowed time in our lives makes the need to hold on even more desperate. Alas, it is a trait I have worked hard to remove but still sometimes fail at, my understanding of O’Brien’s universal message notwithstanding.

As writers, we have these “things” in our work as well. For the novelist, we hold on to the elegantly written paragraph that just doesn’t fit. For the poet, its the perfect words that just doesn’t mesh in the line. For the essayist, its the crisp and commanding voice while making a point that doesn’t come close to arguing the thesis. We all encounter this problem at some point in our careers, and many times we as creators simply cannot let go of the thing which we created, even though we know without a shadow of a doubt that it belongs in the trash can.

Take my advice: Don’t attempt to publish work knowing that you could have done better had you just let go of some things. Had you just loosened the stranglehold on those precious words that you think you’ll never forget. If you are physically unable to highlight and press “Delete,” then create a “Cuts” file, throw them in there, and tell yourself that you’ll put them in another story or poem one day. Heck, if it’s really elegant tell yourself you’ll put them in a love letter for a significant other. Just get them out of there. Trust me, you will forget them within five minutes, and you will feel even more in control of your story and your work as a whole than you would’ve felt had you kept them.

What sat on my closet shelf for years was not the music, but the cases that had once held the discs. Pretty, clean, and at one time, necessary. But not anymore. My music collection had been streamlined long earlier with a book of plastic sleeves, and for the writer the revising process is no different. We streamline and make our stories better, and all of a sudden we come across a paragraph or line that just doesn’t fit anymore. But we love it. We worked so hard and so long to finish it. We remember exactly where we were and how good it felt to finally break loose and be able to write that day. Heck, we might even remember what we had for breakfast. It doesn’t matter. Get rid of the cases. Discard those stubborn passages. Do it and your story will make music. Fail to do this, and your creation might turn into a clanging gong.

Jeff LeJeune is the author of The Final Chase and Postmarked Baltimore. After a deadly disease during college redirected the course of his life, Jeff became a teacher at St. Louis Catholic High School in Lake Charles, LA where he was recently named a Claes Nobel Educator of Distinction.