The Writing Has Gone Missing

And it's heartbreaking.

I'd written four paragraphs and was coming to the natural conclusion. My finger hit something as they flew across the keyboard - I've no idea what - and the whole page of text disappeared. I went to hit control Z and, too late, noticed I'd hit shift Z. So it's gone. And I've no way to recreate it. I tried. 

Have you ever been in the zone of writing and suddenly what you've written disappears? 

It was not carefully crafted, but whimsically stream of consciousness, an ode to the end of a 20-year war and a question about how we have been shaped by war as a lifestyle. 

Today's lesson is in letting go. In not grieving over disappearing text and writing that cannot be recaptured. This is the danger with writing of any kind. Computers fail, paper burns, stories disintegrate. Nothing is sure or certain or completely secure. 

I learned this lesson from the associate publisher of my college newspaper after a copy editor mangled my review of a jazz pianist. She did not understand what I was writing or was working too quickly to care, thought she needed to change something, and made me look like I didn't understand what I was writing about. I was furious. Embarrassed by how I'd been made to look. Challenged the copy desk chief and suggested that copy editors should stay in their lane. The associate publisher told me to stop being a self-righteous reporter, that my copy is not God.  

My copy may not be God, but there is no reason why it cannot be excellent. 

The next semester, I was named Arts and Entertainment Editor and succeeded in being able to change policy so I could sit with the copy editor when my section went to them, and had the authority to approve or reject changes. It is specialized reporting, after all, and the experience I'd had as a music writer was not the first incident of mangled copy. It was a positive change that continued going forward.

I've been working on a piece of writing since March, short fiction, and the story has stalled. I'm not sure where it is going next. The air went out of the project in May when I learned of the death of a close friend. There are threads of loss, grief, transition, and remaking life that are weaving themselves together in the story, and being plunged into fresh loss and grief took me out of the story and set me into another, one I am living rather than writing. 

But as I think about it, the only thing I've lost is a timetable. Maybe. It could be I've lost the story too, that it disintegrated before being finished, or that it may transform into something different, or that it's taken a winding detour through a dark wood where I cannot see three steps ahead. 

Creation is not absolute. What is created takes on life at some point, and life tends to decide what comes next, not the creator. We don't always have control. And, usually, we have a lot less control than we'd like to think we have. So sometimes the writing goes missing, stories fall apart, projects lose their air. We step on a path, only to discover at some point the path ends suddenly or splits into two, four, or endless directions.

A Hundred Days of Happiness is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience. 

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.