Writers are hoarders. They collect news clippings, store event programs, and stash notes scribbled on napkins.
These practices may not keep them in good standing with their uninformed significant others, but they need to do these things to always be working. The ten-year-old news story about an environmental incident might solve a problem the novelist was having in establishing a context for the setting of a long-abandoned book. The playbill from a forgotten Off-Broadway musical twelve years ago might help a poet recall a line from a song that she can weave into an unpublished sonnet she started last year. A note about a conversation overheard in a diner fifteen years ago might hand a playwright just the sentence she needs to close a scene in one of her deferred theatrical works.
Writers do not forever abandon their filed projects. They won't let them fade away until they do.
These practices may not keep them in good standing with their uninformed significant others, but they need to do these things to always be working. The ten-year-old news story about an environmental incident might solve a problem the novelist was having in establishing a context for the setting of a long-abandoned book. The playbill from a forgotten Off-Broadway musical twelve years ago might help a poet recall a line from a song that she can weave into an unpublished sonnet she started last year. A note about a conversation overheard in a diner fifteen years ago might hand a playwright just the sentence she needs to close a scene in one of her deferred theatrical works.
Writers do not forever abandon their filed projects. They won't let them fade away until they do.
