All week long I have been working on cleaning my office. It’s a long process because even after two years in this house, not everything has a home. And as beautiful as my office is, I haven’t been writing in it. I’ve been writing on the couch in the library which is fine for blog posts and occasional emails but not so great for making progress on the novel.
So I’ve been cleaning and sorting and throwing things away which means bringing some giant stacks of paperwork, sitting on the couch, and sifting through it all.
When I found notes about an airplane accident I got all excited and for the next hour, all I could think about was working on Flyboy’s story. Then I found a stack of pages from the dayjob. I was ready to throw them away but when I turned them over there were all sorts of notes about Plant Kid on the back. Flyboy disappeared and I was lost in the world of plants and worms and evil neighbors.
I continued sorting business cards into a pile of contacts and Bed, Bath and Beyond coupons into a shopping stack. When I found a recipt I tried to read the faded ink to decipher if it was needed for taxes. It wasn’t, but on the back were a few words, the beginnings of a poem that I wrote when sitting in a boring meeting. Each scrap of paper had to be instpected front and back in case precious prose was waiting for me to find it.
I’m amazed I was able to keep cleaning at all.
I love this. I just love all the traces of writing you’ve found from your time at “work.” 🙂
It was rather affirming for me. 🙂
Exactly! Well, my notes are about other story ideas. But that’s why I dread tidying up and why it takes so long when I do.
I know….it takes soooo long because everything leads to something else. And I don’t really have a good way of storing/saving all those scraps. Putting them into the computer just isn’t the same. I want to TOUCH them.
It sounds like cleaning out my purse. I also write on the back of anything I can find. So it’s always slow going. Glad you found all those tidbits. You never know what is going to be the one gem that you might accidentally throw out. Good for you!!
I’m in purging the office mode this week, too!
Yay on finding those gems of inspiration!
That happens whenever I decide to make order out of the random chaos on my desk. As the snippets and story bits surface, it gives me a charge and suddenly I want to work on all of them right now! Sometimes we need that 🙂
I *so* hear you. I’ve been in this house for almost 3.5 years and not everything has a home yet. This year, we’re streamlining and stripping back the unnecessaries, so I’m hoping to have a clean and organized home by the time 2010 rolls around.
I have those kinds of notes all over my office too!