untitled6.docx

This is a piece from Are.na Annual 2025, which is now available for purchase.

As children, we learn about what it means to be a living thing. What makes you, or the tree outside your window, different from a cloud or a rock. The state of living is boiled down frugally to a handful of terms — movement, growth, sensitivity, respiration, nutrition, excretion, and reproduction. We learn that it is through these processes that the material, fleshly objects that we are become living things. Living is something we do (verb) and not something we simply are (noun). The word “document” is both a noun and verb. It is and does. In the “and,” at the intersection of document-as-noun and document-as-verb, sits the draft. The draft is the document documenting. It is a collection of processes, much like those we learned in science class — a living document.

Drafts move and grow. The particular magic of a draft is that it is incomplete — and thus, not static. By mere function, the draft always extends and expands and changes form, or, at the very least, holds the promise of this. There is always the chance of more — of alteration and adjustment and addition and repositioning and removal. In my own poetry writing practice, this happens through strikethroughs, through arrows pointing between lines, words, or across pages, through subscripts and notes in the margins. They feel like visual compositions of their own, preserving and documenting the puzzling-together process of the draft. You have the pieces there in front of you — a first line, a particular image or metaphor, a structural idea — but you don’t yet know what the poem will be, what it will become. You move the pieces around, figure out how the lines fit together, try out different words until you find the one that holds the nuance you need.

I find similar delight in the ways that many drafts begin with ephemera — on post-its, napkins, and the backs of receipts. Ephemera sometimes (wonderfully) documents where inspiration finds us: William Carlos Williams, for example, drafted poems, theories on poetry and ideas for plays on prescription pads — proof of his writing pouring into his daily work as a physician. Ephemera are fitting vessels for the seed of the draft, for the idea. And then the draft grows beyond them. It moves to spaces that are less transient, that have more room for its development — from an idea, to an attempt, to a work in progress, to finally (hopefully) a finished work.

The draft is sensitive to stimuli — to criticism and critique, to being seen by others. Sensitivity is necessary. I am thinking here about the importance of a responsiveness to new and old ideas in pushing the draft forward through its transformations. But sensitivity also requires caution. Meet the tender sprouts of your own draft with a critical and exacting eye, and you risk cutting and chopping at what perhaps only needed time or a gentler hand. Present a draft to someone before it is ready, before it has grown any sort of spine to hold itself up, and a misinterpretation may send it skittering, unsure. This is part of what the draft’s state as a living thing asks of you — to take care of it. It requires learning what it needs, and when — attention or time away, watering or pruning, play or examination, freedom or direction, seclusion or the scrutiny of another’s eye, and, perhaps the most difficult, stubborn pursuit of its completion or letting go.

Drafts breathe and eat. Borrowed science-class framing aside, “metabolic” is a word I am drawn to using here anyway, to describe the processes of change within a draft. I am also thinking about the Latin root for “inspiration,” spirare, which means breathe. Instead of respiring and constructing tissue or drawing energy from fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, the draft constructs work from ideas, inspiration, thoughts, and theories.  The etymological root of the word “draft” itself points to this process — “the act of pulling or drawing.” From an intention, it draws out something material. From life and existence, it pulls subject matter, perspective, ideas. From the work of others, it distills theory, inclination, taste. From the history of your past work, it constructs a style. And from the repetition of all this, across the time and space of many drafts, we build a practice.

The draft is a threshing ground. Drafts sift out the clunky and heavy-handed, the unresolved, and the rudimentary to expel this as waste. Sometimes, in the very physical form of a balled-up piece of paper aimed at a dustbin. The draft, by definition, can be messy and ugly. With documents, or the final versions of a piece of writing, there is an expectation of completeness, of having cleaned everything up. But in the draft, the embarrassingly cliche, the half-baked, the naive, all of this is allowed to exist. A useful draft is curious, it doesn’t insist on being certain or even good. What it asks of you is honesty. In return, it offers you the small mercy of a place to try.

A draft is a pre-document. It is what comes before, what encodes, or is responsible for producing, a document. Through repeated reproduction, each variation of a draft evolves, introducing, cutting out, or passing on particular genetic information to the next. In ways similar to how you carry echoes of your lineage in the shape of your nose or the texture of your hair, some of this genetic information lingers in each draft. There, in  the roughest first draft, are the beginnings of a particular thought that becomes the spine of the final work. Or, the draft cross-pollinates — the tangent in one becoming the root of another. There are old drafts of mine running underneath newer work always, whether I mean for them to be there or not. Sometimes, their presence is more subtle: there, in the genetic code of my approach, process or practice. Our drafts, whatever they become (or don’t become), never truly leave us. They endure. They are personal hypo-text, the source work that underlies the work that comes to be.

To be a living thing is also to be mortal, and in the document the life of the draft ceases. It is terrifying in its finality, in the ways it expects an actualization of my best, my finest. It looms. It reads like an obituary, the summary of a life. The document can often obscure or mystify its process. It is a product, an outcome, and is thus often centered as the main consideration in the work of writing. This orientation towards product over process diminishes the work of the draft, and refuses to consider the draft as a meaningful form of writing in and of itself. This consideration of meaningfulness is easier with the drafts, notes, journals of writers that we think of as accomplished. We give their pre-documents the weightiness of worth, honor them in exhibitions, and call these objects artifacts. Because their pre-documents give us insight into their process, they make their genius human. Perhaps we believe that somewhere in their drafts, we will find remedy for the ache or resistance of our own work. 

In this reverence there lies an implicit understanding that the draft is meaningful. That the work that doesn’t make it to the final form still informs it. The draft, in all its processes, offers us possibility, the magic of change and transformation. It offers us the practice of attention. It offers us practice itself. The draft offers us a place to be honest, to stumble and fail and try again. It offers proof of our evolution, of our beginnings and histories. In considering the place and space and function of the draft as a living document, we can give some of that consideration to our own living, to all within us that is still a work in progress. Still a draft.