Writing Adjacent or Distraction?

How My "Save it for Later" Process Needed to Change

One of my regular practices is to write a 5 Things essay I learned from Summer Brennan. The word DISTRACTIONS is often a topic I explore in my notebook or document labeled 5 THINGS. [Other reoccurring themes are SPOONS, LABRYINTH, and COFFEE but that is another post!] I am my own worst distraction.

Photo by Dan Barrett on Unsplash

I searched for “distraction” in the image library and the above picture came up. It seems to work today. Are Guinea Pigs distracting? I suppose so…

I am a consistent gatherer of ideas in notebooks and my Keep app on my phone. I am not a consistent user of said notes. There is writerly debate concerning if one needs to revisit these notes. Some things just find their way into pieces without referencing the notes. The act of writing them down seem to lodge them somewhere in the brain allowing access.

A writer friend of mine at the Icleand writers retreat I attended last fall called it Magpieing. A term I have borrowed over the last 6 months. I also refer to this as creating a compost pile which is a term I heard from Neil Gaiman. Some of the gathering is fear. The fear of losing an idea and not being able to retrieve it. This has happened to me many times. It is also why I frantically write down my dreams when I first wake up. There is surreal writing gold in those dream images.

One of the main writer traps I fell into for way too long is the Save It For Later idea.

Examples:

• Write a 50,000 word draft during NANOWRIMO and come back to revise it later.

• Just write and come back fix it later - it is most important to get the ideas down.

• Write morning pages [3 pages of handwritten stream-of-consciousness writing] and forget about it

• Fill a notebook of freewriting and reread it when you get to the end

Some of these above ideas I am not opposed to completely but lately they get in the way of finished products.

If I wait too long to revise then I tend to lose the heat and the magic of the ideas I was trying to convey in the first place. Recently while transcribing old notebooks I read about people and ideas I have no context for and no recollection of why I took the time to write it down in the first place.

I was so focused for years on getting the words down that now I have to schedule time to reread. I have been stuck in the generation phase for years with only short bursts of conscious revision.

I like to refer to these ideas as ghosts that live in between the lines written on the page. It takes me rereading and filling in the blanks, or deleting.

But this part of the way I work. Isn’t all writing advice like this? You listen to what works for other people and decide after a trial period whether it works for you. Sometimes you modify it for your own process. But some of these practices I have dragged on for too long with blind loyalty.

One of the phrases I say to my writing students is, “Don’t should all over yourself.” We get these ideas in our brains from the dreaded THEY voices which are the Greek chorus of the modern day. [Just for reference this was a note I made after a conversation with a good friend of mine the other day]. Everyone has these spirals of “what will THEY say” which back us into a corner of what we think we should do.

I have made a conscious goal to NOT save things for later and to take the time to use the ideas that I have taken the time to curate and make them something useful.

This morning I am using my notes and placing them in drafts or new documents in order to use the work I have already done. I don’t want to lose the spark of an idea because I have bonfires to create!

As a writer, do you relate to this idea of SAVE IT FOR LATER? How do you cope?