It is not enough to understand what we ought to be, unless we know what we are; and we do not understand what we are, unless we know what we ought to be.
I was fortunate enough to get a job at my alma mater, which brought me back to Indiana after being gone for twenty years. There is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back. They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.
You have to decide what is extraneous and what is central. There is always more to tell. If you want to have a finished product, at some point you have to say "enough."