I’m a hoarder by nature. Pre-Goddess, I shifted flat innumerable times and each shift entailed a re-evaluation of my hoarding criteria. With each shift I held on to less and less. But what I held on to mattered. Or I couldn’t bring myself to part with. Either reason was good enough for me to schlep it around.
Amongst the clutter that I dragged around were reams of ideas and notes and bits of stories. Each story had an audit trail of previous iterations. I drew comfort from the fact that if whatever change I’d made in version x.y+1 didn’t pan out, I could go back to v.x.y, copy-and-paste what I needed, and continue with v.x.y+2.
I didn’t tell a soul about this. It smelt of eccentric writerly behaviour and I feared it might lead to some superstitious obsessive compulsive behaviour. And then DJ Ash gifted me a movie book, inside which was the following:
I like to have all the actual physical pages that I have done in front of me: all the drafts, and all the revisions, and all the markings on them. It gives me a sense of security; ie., ‘look at all these drafts you have done, you must be a very responsible person – now all you have to do is use your good taste and refine these pages’. – David Mamet, Some Freaks
And all was well in the Land of D.
