Contributed by Nicole.

Raise can have a few meanings. Raise can mean ‘to help grow’. It can also mean ‘to elevate’. Of course, you can also use the other form; ‘raze’ which means ‘to destroy’.

We have all been there. We look at what we have been working on and just want to through it out, delete it in disgust, struggle with the desire to take a hammer to the keyboard to make your computer an effigy to your creative dissatisfaction with what your brain has wrought or light whatever physical manifestation of your work on fire.

Your characters are just not doing what you want them to do. In fact, they are all but blowing raspberries in your direction. If you’re a painter, your colors are running or just not right, not fitting your vision. Or, you just sneezed in the middle of a brush stroke and the pigment did a weird zig zag.

But wait! Pull back from razing your work and ‘raise’ it. My personal trick is to copy and paste the work into a separate document and file it in my ‘Snippets’ folder. There is a chance that I can use it at a later date or in another story. I make it like a seedling in the Potting Shed of my imagination to be planted in a story at a later date.

I am fairly certain that painters have their own tricks. Maybe the zig zag can be incorporated into the design in a new way. Or, you may be able to scrape it off. You may be able to just run with it.

Sometimes the creative process is a series of highs and lows. The low points happen, and you just cannot use what just came out of your brain. I know that recently, I stared at eight hundred thirty seven words of work that just did not fit into the situation that I was trying to write. I could not get my characters to the next point with what was sitting on my Word document.

I can admit it: I highlighted the whole shebang and was one keystroke away from wiping from existence and that universe, but sanity prevailed, and it went into ‘Snippets’. Partly because I do not want to have wasted that time but also because it could be a metaphorical transplant into a separate ‘garden’ or a new bed in my existing one later on.

That scene can help elevate the existing story later or go into a new work by changing the characters. I can ‘raise’ it rather than ‘raze’ it.

Sometimes you will ‘raze’ or destroy your work. If you look at that mental garden bed and see weeds rather than tomatoes and you just put all of what you yank out of the ground in the metaphorical compost pile, then accept it and move on. After all, gardens need fertilizer too and your mental compost may lead to something truly beautiful. Growth can come from destruction as well as from effort.