Why it’s taken me years to finish the first draft of my book

After lots of planning and note-taking, this week poet and artist Frieda Hughes finally printed out her ideas for a new book… only to realise that she had more than enough material

THE FIRST DRAFT

The book idea was just a passing thought

– A bit of a skeleton of an idea –

But its bones pierced pages, buried themselves and took root.

It didn’t have a plan of attack or a map of the way forward,

Just a string of words that had meanings, like new shoots

That might one day flower. The projected task

Was like standing at the base of the Post Office Tower

With a carabiner, a piece of string and stick-on fingernails.

Month after month as the years passed by, I’d add pages

Scraped from the footprints of the idea as it walked forward.

I was not finishing anything,

Only pulling the threads for the final weave

From the thin air in my head, stitching them into separate documents

That might one day be read as a book.

Taking my manuscript of oddments in a rucksack

I planned a motorbike ride with an editing biro to a lazy café.

But the printer just kept on printing, the minutes stacking into hours,

And I found that my written efforts so far

Required a wheelbarrow, or even a car, and now I see

How spoon by spoon you can empty an ocean.