Back to the Work

Well, you finished one. It sits there on display, but nobody wants it, even as a gift. It is what you thought you wanted to do, felt compelled to make. And there, in the flesh, panting, covered with afterbirth, it rests, the best you have, but less than what you hoped it might be. You wanted it to speak so beautifully that others would find in it what drove you to write it. Well, it looks like that isn't going to happen, right now anyway. So where do you go? What do you do? I'll tell you what. You can't leave, so you go back in, listen some more, and do it again. And again. You keep sharpening that stone until you can shave with it. You will work up the point where you collapse, or that place where you're done, that point where they find in your work a touch so true and cruel that they weep with joy. After all, there is nowhere to go but where you have to be.