Precious Ideas

'There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.' - Ernest Hemingway

A hard and long time had passed. The trees have died with your many ideas and one sprout remains which you cling to and tend to, until - finally - it is a thought good enough to be an idea.
Not just an idea but your idea. Your thought. You've clung to it, you've developed it and now society agrees with you when you implicitly state by way of showcase that you own it.
It started with this doodle. I drew it with a thought of it's personal meaning to me whilst listening to someone give a talk. It reflects a lot of the process I go through as an artist;
I write one line of lyric or poetry and it becomes the line looking for the song it can belong to and be with. My poor poetry.
I doodle on scraps of paper as I did then and when the time comes to put these papers in the recycling bin I hesitate and think 'Oh... Maybe I can use this for something...?' And my brain works on being inspired by something that was never truly inspiring and seeks to recycle - or 'upcycle' - doodles of chairs, lines about love or two chord progressions into something usable. My poor art.
What do you do when you have hit a wall? The Smart find a way to climb around it. The Determined push through it. The Shy back away from it. The Realist accepts that they may be looking at a wall but in another direction, there is only rubble. Or is that the Optimist? Or the Hopeful?
Reality injected itself into my system in that moment. I will never use this doodle again.
I can't use everything. It has a meaning to me now which I'll forget when I look at it and I can remember the theory without the awfully drawn recording. And suddenly a greater thought appears: There is so much I will create that is not only of a standard I am uncomfortable with, but also is unsuitable for further development.
Accepting, after the process has been begun or is done, however short, that not everything can be pushed into work is hard when you have worked and worked on something. Not every line will be a line in a song. You are sorry to let it go. However some writings should simply stay as thoughts and musings. That is their identity.
It is very tempting to bleed into your work and then feel dejection as if your blood has been wasted when half of that notepad sees the recycling bin. But the glimmer and shine of this sadness is that there will be more. There will be more ideas. More thoughts, more musings. More triggers and developments into actual usable material which you then use to create work better than before. That is the Hopeful meeting the Realist. You disregard flippancy and value contribution and worth. But you own the huge freedom in learning to not be so precious over an idea that you insist upon it, when you need to accept that it is time to progress and simply to move on from it.
What happened to my doodle? It went into the recycling bin. But what happened to the three lines of lyric I wrote almost a year ago and couldn't find a fit for?... Well a month ago it found it's song. Only some things will ever be used. And now I'm going to go and bleed some more.