This is a good time to start a blog, as we begin to turn our garage into a writing room for me. It’s a thing I’ve hankered after, for as long as I can remember, but in a busy house, packed to the rafters with people and their stuff, it never seemed feasible. The garage is our overflow space. But recently we found woodworm out there, then the roof started to leak. I can take a hint as well as the next person – if we have to take everything out, treat the wood and change the roof, we might as well add a floor, bookshelves and a few electric sockets while we’re at it. The skip has arrived. The clearing has begun.
This process is sure to disturb more dust, cobwebs and ghosts of former lives than any sane person would want. A quick survey of the junk that has to be cleared: stuff that came back with us from the US, twenty years ago. Warped vinyls, toys, a school trunk. Fossils (literally). An inordinate number of boots, not all in pairs. A crate full of rackets, balls, kites, buckets and spades. A wicker rocking dog. And behind the toolbox, the old tins of paint, the rollers and the trays: boxes and boxes of old notes, drafts, unfinished stories, notes from a previous academic life, an abandoned Ph.D. What should I do: read through them? Salvage some? Or take the plunge and junk them without looking?
Ah - we've all been there! I would try and not handle things more than once...i.e. look and decide does it go into the skip or keep...and be ruthless! You don't NEED any of this stuff - if you haven't needed it in 20 years, you won't need it again. Maybe get a scanner and scan PhD stuff so you have it digitized...but clean out as much as you can!
ReplyDeleteGood advice. The problem is: what if some of those drafts are not beyond redemption? What if the ideas are workable? What if a single, perfect sentence is buried in the detritus?
ReplyDeleteI have been reading The Gift by Lewis Hyde (well, dipping in and out). I've just read a bit where he quotes Alan Ginsberg about the opposite kind of writing (to a blog). Writing 'which you will not publish and you won't show people. [...] It means abandoning... the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world... and just settling down in the muck of your own mind.[...] You really have to make a resolution to just write for yourself..., in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what yourself is saying.' This appeals to me (well maybe not so much the 'muck' bit), just now I have a new play gestating but I'd like to challenge myself to write without thought for myself or the imagined reader (which is the ego I suppose). I wonder if it's possible and then think what a ghastly drab weird read it might be. Hyde says this is Ginsberg setting aside evaluation and looking for the "gift" within his own creativity. Hm. Here's hoping my creativity has a parcel for me to pass on.
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