spring cleaning (writer's edition)

Spring cleaning!

Now is the season when our Circadian rhythms (or at least the little angels on our shoulders) decide it's time to clean house. We dust and scrub, and we throw things away. This year, I am extending this sun-induced frenzy to include my writing folders.

I have been writing pretty much constantly now for over two years, and my writing folder is littered with the corpses of abandoned ideas and fully-formed orphans. It is not understatement to say, if my writing were on actual paper and not on a computer, I could possibly have killed off a small forest by now. This is what happens without focus and moments of reflection.

So now, I am reflecting.

I've been trying to figure out why I spent time and effort on things that end up abandoned. What is to follow here is for the pantsers (i.e., those writerly types who make it up as they go along). Maybe if I publicly excoriate myself, it'll be helpful to someone somewhere. At the very least, I am processing so as not to do it as much.

Many of the pieces strewn hither and yon are short. I got an idea, and I followed it through to its natural conclusion. I do this a lot. This blog post is a good example. I write to process the world, and I write to get things out of my head so I can move on. With this blog post, there is a place to put it, and it's done. I also do this because writing formal poetry is a way I relax, like doing Sudoku with words. I have many things that are done but that don't have any place to go. These tend to be poems (as mentioned), picture book texts, short stories, and essays.

Then I have the half-begun things. Many times with these, I hit a wall of vagueness. I have not planned, so I have no idea --really --where I'm going. They fall into several categories:

• The "I need to research to get background";
• The "I got most of the way through this short story, and I don't know why";
• The "Half-done outline";
• The "Random sentence that's phrased so well, I can surely use it in something"; and
• The "Oh yeah. I forgot about this because I got distracted by that ..."

Most of these, I will never do anything with, history tells me. If I were going to do something, surely I would have already? Some of them, upon seeing, I don't even remember writing. With the exception of the "I need to research to get background" group, I'm not sure they're worth saving. Or maybe I need to organize them differently? I don't know. This organizing thing doesn't come naturally. I am a pantser through and through. Need to try, though. It's like hoarding ideas --you can't do anything if you can't find anything and you can't move.

One thing's for sure, anyhow: spring cleaning is satisfying when it comes to clearing away cobwebs and bad habits. Here's hoping the clearing brings some clarity. So far, so good.