Fossils of the Mind--Recovering the Ferly

“The mind has her fossils too,” a poem by C. S. Lewis begins, and his verse describes the time when “the pen, fast, fast / Ate up the sheets,” but then the project lost its spark, died out, and ended up in a drawer somewhere because “the ferly would not last.” “Ferly” means wonder, magic, astonishment. Sometimes, he recognized, writing seems magically inspired, but somehow the magic slips away, the story or poem loses its enchantment, and we abandon it.

Maenads and Silenus in Prince Caspian

Do lost stories ever come back? I’d like to suggest they can. In fact, the old fossils of the mind can be brought back to life like Elijah’s dry bones. I’ve experienced this with my own writing. 

Early in my writing days, I worked on science fiction. Like many science fiction writers, I did 

considerable world-building. I created planets, civilizations, and races of beings, intergalactic empires, good aliens and bad ones, and characters who arose out of these different places. The trouble was, my ability to create them did not equal my ability to express what I had created. My writing ability, still in its infancy, failed to adequately express the cosmos I had created. So I abandoned them. But they did not go away entirely. Like Lewis says in his poem, I occasionally encounter them: "Old papers, as we rummage through / Neglected drawers.” I would see old drafts, re-read them, smile at the clumsy writing, and feel nostalgia for those old stories and worlds.

As my technique developed, as I had some success as a writer, I began to think of them again. They were good ideas. I had created an attractive cosmos. The old characters were interesting. I simply had not possessed the technique to present them well enough.

My first attempt at getting the ferly back resulted in a story called Antigone. It did not use old characters but did use the old sci-fi universe I had created.  Not long after that I published two more stories using the universe. And of late, I pulled one of my old characters out of the drawer and wrote a story about her—slated for publication as well. 

I saw the ferly return.

Lewis attributes the failure of some imaginative projects to the chasm between what the imagination can come up with and the demands of life, time, and energy. Very true, but I like to think that sometimes it is mere lack of technique. We improve as writers, and some of the projects we had to abandon in our earlier careers (Shakespeare had one character call it “my salad days, when I was young and green”) might be resurrected. I’ve begun doing this with my own early writing:  rewriting it, using old characters and old tropes. So far, it is bearing some good fruit.

I think we all have our creative fossils. Sometimes the ferly ran out—but did it run out merely because our reach exceeded our grasp? Because we simply did not have the ability to set down what our imaginations presented to us? I like to think this was the case with me. Now I’m going back to the old quarries and seeing what I can dig up, reshape, and start to shape into new forms. When I do this, the ferly animates and the pen begins to eat  up the sheets of paper once more.

The freshness of my early ideas delights me when I go back and look on them. It’s hard work to reshape literary creations, but it’s rewarding. If you have fossils of your own, dig them up and take a look at them. You might be surprised at the rough beauty of what got buried.