The writer Rudyard Kipling apparently had – in addition to the usual wastepaper-basket of a writer writing nearly a hundred years or more ago now – a kind of box or case labelled ‘Notions’, where he kept notes, ideas, unfinished stories, and the like. Things he’d like to come back to later, or maybe turn over in his mind some more.
I imagine Kipling – writing by hand, and with no word processors (and only later in life starting to experiment with typewriters, even) – probably knew as well as anyone, that writing takes place inside our heads as much as it does on paper, and that the things that really matter, are decided more by instinct than by conscious design.
“Guess I done overthunk it again …”
If there’s one thing a writer knows about, it’s those times when the words aren’t flowing – or life isn’t going right – and we find ourselves really, really overthinking things. As if, if we could only analyse something enough, we could think our way out of it. As if everything somehow must or ought to be the result of our conscious intentions.
To borrow a line from Shakespeare (the original writer’s writer), ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be’ … What we choose matters, but it’s far from the only thing that does.
The Screw-Up That Made Good:
Life’s a little bit like a writer’s workroom. We have all the things in progress, the unfinished stories, the scenes we are, so to speak, still writing by living them – not to mention the overflowing wastepaper-basket of things we know or don’t know – and, and this is important, we have always by our side a belief and insight that is at the core of what a writer does, and of what human beings do every day: “The story isn’t over yet.”
Our worst mistakes, the ones that maybe even keep us awake nights, are by no means as bad as they seem – and certainly not as bad as we think – and it’s only by making those mistakes, that we can learn from and rise so far above them, as to be actually glad we made them in the first place.
Now isn’t that something worth believing in …