Decluttering Your Writing Past

I have deadlines. My time management skills (so to speak) are such that I suddenly seem to have work demands coming at me from all sides. Some poetry that I’ve promised an editor (yeah, you try writing poetry on demand); two separate novels in various stages of completion; a new ghostwriting project. And some volunteer obligations. And… but enough about my schedule, it’s giving me a headache just thinking about it.

One would think that all of this pressure would have me applying myself to get it done. One would be wrong.

I saw a cartoon on social media (all right, the cartoon was sent to me on social media by someone who knows me well) that read, “Faced with a looming deadline, Vera’s first move is to watch some cute-kitten videos online.”

I’m not at the cute-kitten phase (and please shoot me if I ever am), but I’m with Vera. I’m finding a lot that needs doing right away, stuff that has nothing to do with my projects and their looming deadlines.

In that “right away” category is a folder on my computer’s hard drive called “Other misc. writing.” It is, I discovered, a treasure-trove of semi-articulated ideas, almost-finished novels and short stories, lists of potential titles and half-baked thoughts, poems begun that make no sense at all, even material that I have absolutely no memory of ever having written. And yet there it is.

So, I decided, it’s time to clean out that folder. Trash the stuff that didn’t work then, doesn’t work now, will never in this lifetime even have a stab at working.

It’s an interesting journey, back into the early days of my storing my work in bytes rather than paper pages, and some of it has not aged well. But, on the other hand, I’ve been met with a flood of memories: the year I spent writing op-eds for a Romanian newspaper; a memorial I wrote at the death of a beloved mentor; a whole set of essays for a long-defunct online site called Themestream.

So what does one do with all this vetus supellectilem? It’s not the work of a day, or even a week. But decluttering one’s work product is just as important as decluttering any other aspect of one’s life, and here’s the best part: it gives you that same good feeling of lightness, of a task finished, of being able to find what you need and not get waylaid by memories or old opinions or absolutely opaque thoughts. It’s a great feeling, actually.

But now—back to my regularly scheduled deadlines…!