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Keep the originals ... please ...

9/4/2014

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What do you do with all of those old, unused scraps of potential ideas that you wrote on napkins and other odd bits of paper; those random phrases that haven't quite coalesced into something workable?

The image of a frustrated writer tossing sheet after sheet of crumpled paper into his waist bin is a familiar one, and it makes me cringe whenever I see it.  No, dear writer, no!  
You hold onto those sheets!

I've sometimes wondered what the drawings that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec did on napkins and on tablecloths looked like.  Apparently, one such drawing, done with a burnt matchstick, still exists.  One. 

Every once in a while, I'll go rifling through my "Box of Poetry" and review every scrap therein, hoping for ideas that I can use, and I often find inspiration among those latent, partially-formed notions.

Granted, I lost many of my scraps, as well as completed work, during various moves from house to house, else my box would have had to be a great deal larger.  Now, I store my scraps on digital media ...   

... which can have negative consequences, too.  I used to carry an Apple iPod with me to quickly jot, and store, vignettes of thought. One day, my handy iPod broke.  Alas, I hadn't backed it up yet.


So, I've learned to backup my data files, and to keep those sheets of notes even though I now have digital copies.  As a writer, I cannot have too much stockpiled redundancy, save for corrupted files.

When I think about my lost bits and pieces that ended up who knows where, I feel that I can almost remember them, that they are only just out of my reach, and that they are simply beyond wonderful.

I might even go so far, one day, to seek out a hypnotist who will put me under his pendulum spell and have me recite all those words that went astray.  For now, I make sure to keep every scrap of my scraps.  




Image: stampspaperandink.typepad.com
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    About the author:

    I've written many poems over the years.  This blog is a preview of my books: Echoes, Neo-Victorian Poetry (April 2013), Echoes ll, More Neo-Victorian Poetry (May 2014), Echoes lll, Even More Neo-Victorian Poetry, (August 2016), A Compilation of Echoes. (September 2016), and When None Command (April 13, 2019)

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