The First Draft
A process piece by Mallika Chennupaty
Mallika Chennupaty was one of our Summer 2024 Digital Residents. As a part of this program, we give our residents the option to publish an excerpt of their work, write a process piece, or have a Q&A with us. Here, Mallika shares a process piece about their approach to creative work. To see the other features, visit Well-Crafted, our community blog.
In front of an empty page, my mind is a small and square room. Shelves line one wall, while books, journals, cardstock, and old mail line the other. The ground is covered in crumpled paper, old candy wrappers, dried pens, tissues, post it notes, torn paper. The couch heaped with gray t-shirts, red socks, a dark green sweater, a light wash jean, a dark wash jean, a white jean, and more socks, yellow and pink. It is when my mind feels this cramped that my hand begins moving across paper.
One paragraph written and it is the floor that shows the first signs of change. As I write word after word, I am squatting on my mind’s ground, sorting through the litter. Candy wrapper, thought to be discarded.
Crumpled paper: jot a sentence on the page.
A tissue: maybe a metaphor,
First torn up note: discard.
Second torn up note: tangential detail scribbled into the paper’s margins.
Third torn up note: maybe a title.
I sort, and sort and sort until I piece together the bones of my piece.
Two pages filled, and the floor is so clean that I can walk next to the shelves of books lining the walls. My hand sweeps across Goodbye, Again, a book I read about three years ago.
Babel along with Dream Works prompt a smile. Next are essays, On Self Respect and Poetry is not a Luxury. A few quotes from each go onto my page.
The shelves contain most anything (books, myths, poems, essays, songs, pictures, recipes, my grandma’s laughter) that has sneaked its way underneath my skin and into my consciousness. As I walk among them, I hold the bones of my writing next to the bones of my inspiration to puzzle together the skeleton, the main themes, of my draft.
Five pages in, my hand is weary, but my mind feels more malleable, more free-flowing. It is almost like after a yoga class, once I have downward-dogged and child posed and warriored my way through loosening my tight and taut muscles. And now softened like a clump of clay, my mind can imagine details, visuals, adjectives to add the muscles, ligaments, tendons, and fat to my piece’s skeleton.
My hand is no longer moving across the page when my mind feels almost clean, almost there. I head to my mind’s couch. Now I am reading my piece as I am folding the heap of clothes on the couch. I fold t-shirts as I fold my sentences. I pair my socks as I pair adjectives with nouns. The sweater hung reveals the right ordering of paragraphs. The jeans, light and dark, become the introduction and conclusion. The white is set aside to be donated, an unneeded excerpt.
Finally, the room is clean. I’ve written and written and written to create space in my mind and fill space on the paper. As I sink into the couch, I look down to find the flesh of a first draft.
