ARE YOU BEING A LITERARY HOARDER?
A new year is a good time to declutter your writing
I was raised to never throw things out. I grew up with grandparents who filled up many rooms of their house with things they no longer reeded—dresses kept since the 1950s, church annuals going back to the ’60s, old tube radios and TVs my grandpa picked up at yard sales and liked to fiddle with. Their house wasn’t pathological or unsafe but it was…rather full. They had boxes and bags stacked throughout the front hall and entryway of their home to the extent that the side door was the only one in use. “They lived through the Depression,” my parents would always say, yet most of the things in the boxes and bags didn’t have much to do with survival and were never used again.
As happens with families, neuroses can skip a generation and I grew up with this scarcity mindset too. Saying goodbye to objects I’ve collected over the years—or ideas—is hard even now. (In contrast, my late mother left her house as spare as a hitman whose real identity had been burned.)
For many of us, our writing gets cluttered up by ideas we had in the beginning that we’re not quite delivering on. It’s a room with a stack of boxes in the corner: some pages contain useful things, but if you aren’t managing them to the best of your ability, they might as well go.
If it’s time to clean your closet, I’m here to help with a few suggestions….
