Saving Words

Good Morning, Dear Readers.

There appears to be some confusion about the paragraphs in italics in yesterday’s entry. That bit of story was just free flowing association with the main symptoms of whatever this sickness/crud/yuckiness is. I wanted to make sure I blogged yesterday and didn’t want to use illness as an excuse not to write. However, my brain was so cloudy the only thing I could think to do was turn the negative aspect of being sick into a positive writing exercise. Those paragraphs have nothing to do with my National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) story – I can’t and won’t start writing that until November 1st. To do otherwise would be cheating myself, even if no one else knew about it. So, I thank you for the kind words about my writing but nope, that wasn’t my NaNoWriMo novel.

However, I will be saving those words. I’ll put them in a folder I’ve had forever, labeled simply ‘blurbs.’ That’s what those little snippets are to me, just blurbs – but only for the moment (or a year or two) because I may need to refer to them soon. They will sit there until I need inspiration for something I’m stuck on; sometimes it’s a turn of phrase, sometimes it’s simply a distraction to let my brain rest from whatever I’m working on. I’ll pick up that old manilla folder, read through the blurbs and suddenly I remember why I wrote that piece or, and this happens just a little too often for comfort but it’s true, I clearly see the reason I relegated a particular bit (yes, I shudder at some of my writing, particularly when I stay up way too late and find myself nodding off in front of the monitor) to the blurb file. But those blurbs are important…

They remind me that I DO have ideas and I CAN put two or twenty or two hundred sentences together. They soothe my ego and serve as proof to myself that I can write, have written and will continue to do so.

I just thought of something: putting words on paper is like experiencing a birth and death all at once with all the joys and sorrows that accompany each. Being in the zone, going with the flow, writing on auto-pilot, man-I-was-on-fire ~ all those wonderfully seductive creative highs occur as a writer births their baby (puts the words on the paper). The writer acts as an indulgent parent while their work grows and matures, giving it little nudges here and there to go in the ‘right’ direction. We are so proud of our creations and sometimes they stay with us for years. Sometimes, just moments. But, inevitably, death follows. With a click of the delete button the words are gone. That particularly wonderful/horrible bit is dead. We mourn those words. We mourn the time and attention we lavished on each and every one of those oh-so-special words. We loved those words and even though we know they had a good life, their time on this earth had come to an end. Gone, but not forgotten. Our blurbs in those old manilla folders that always smell like a dusty school room are a writer’s pictures of loved ones.

So, I save my words. I never know when I’ll need the comfort of seeing them again.