October 23, 2012

Hi writers:

I’ve been thinking about writers and waste. A friend of mine who is a great and many-times-published writer throws away half of what she writes. An even-more-published friend throws away two-thirds. Good writers write more than they use. When facing this severe fact, it helps me to remember why we write. We write to remember. To explain. To memorialize somebody. To understand how we feel. To capture beauty. To preserve a memory. To connect with others. We write in order to figure out what we really want to say.

PROCESS: FRESH SLATE

The idea of writing pages and pages before figuring out what we want to say is often referred to by the ugly word “prewriting,” and it is a branch of the even uglier phrase, “killing your darlings.” I prefer to think of these hidden pages as compost: life-matter or mind-matter that recycles itself into new material, new energy, new sentences. For this reason, I always have a “Compost” file for any given project, as well as files titled “Draft 1, 2 etc.” I always begin a new draft as a blank Word document, instead of simply renaming the old document. That way, I can bring in only what is truly necessary and fill the blankness with new writing that is sharper and lovelier than the old.

Try this: If you are stuck on a project in which you already have FAR too much material, try letting go. Think of that material as compost. Start over fresh. Trust that the writing you’ve done will make the new writing better and truer to the ideal (and final) version.

FEATURED VENUE: THE SNOWY EGRET

The Snowy Egret is the oldest independent U.S. journal of nature writing. Their editors look for essays, articles, or stories that focus on “human interaction with the natural world as it is or was rather than as we might imagine or wish it to be.”

Submission guidelines here: http://www.snowyegret.net/primary_pages/submit.html

PROMPT

“_____ , now and then.” [Fill in the blank with any word]. (10min)