Finally finished writing a poem I began at the end of last year – “killed a few darlings” yesterday – and freed them to begin life in some new work 😊 Phew!! 

It was something I just had to complete – but I feel its been blocking me from engaging with anything new.  

“Kill your darlings” is a phrase I learnt earlier this year, meaning that when revising your work, sometimes you’ve got to let go of some of the words/phrases/paragraphs etc that you love the most. Damn that was hard! But I knew that things weren’t working while I kept trying to include these. 

So – after shifting from poetry to prose and back again, with attempts to merge the two, I tried to be ruthless, kept the bits I thought worked the best, ignored some of the original sequence and rearranged lines and verses, and crossed a few things off completely. It’s taken me weeks !!! 

And at the end of all this – two and a half pages of 11pt verse. I hope I never get the urge to write a novel – it would take me years !!!

What I’m excited about and what came as something of a surprise, is that the “darlings” I had to cull immediately began to take on a life of their own. I felt released by removing them and realised they weren’t gone for good – I could keep working with these initial ideas and bring them to completion in their own right(write). 

I’m looking forward to sharing these resurrected darlings when they’re finished. ❤️❤️