You might be wondering what magpies have to do with writing, exactly. To be honest, I’m not altogether sure myself, but I’ve started this thing, so I’m sure I’ll come up with something. Let’s see, birds, birdsongs, feathers, feather your nest… Ah, there we go. Nests. When working on your next written project, make sure you have a sufficient quantity of stray twigs, small bits of thread, and perhaps some mud and wattles.
No, that wasn’t quite it, either. I’ve got it in my head somehow that magpies are great finders and hoarders of “stuff,” from the aforementioned twigs and thread, to perhaps also bellybutton lint (someone else’s; I don’t think magpies have bellybuttons, though I’ve never asked, either). I don’t know if they’re big on wattles, but… alright, before I get too far off track, here’s the point: Save everything. And I do mean everything.
What I’m referring to (incidentally, this is referred to as “burying the lead”) is developing the habit of saving every last little thing you write. That doesn’t mean keeping all the individual scraps of paper, cocktail napkins, bus passes, business cards and brochures on which you’ve scrawled something when the inspiration hit; it means keeping a notebook, and either transcribing those bits, or having the notebook with you in the first place in order that you can jot things down when they come to you.
That’s the first rule. The second rule is, once you’ve written it down in a safe place, don’t throw it away. Earlier, I wrote about the Inner Critic, that voice that tells us that nothing’s quite good enough. S/he’s useful to have around sometimes, because that voice, used properly, spurs you to keep improving. But when the temptation comes to toss something because it’s not up to your usual standards, it’s better to sleep on it, or put it somewhere that you’ll find it later. Much later.
Why? Well, when you come back to something later, you may still have the same opinion of it. But you may also realize that there’s something in there that’s worth having saved it all this time; even if you don’t use the whole original piece verbatim (and generally, you won’t), there’s often parts of it that can be cannibalized and put into other things on which you’re working later. What might originally have seemed a throwaway line may contain the germ of something that sends you on a new direction, while what seemed brilliant at the time (or may have been your reason for writing something in the first place) may have lost some of its luster.
This doesn’t just apply to the “random” stuff, either. I know it’s a lot easier to edit within an existing document than it is to save several versions of it and edit in stages, but there’s an advantage to saving early drafts, as well. Even though E. B. White was right when he said that the best writing is rewriting, there’s still such a thing as too much rewriting. Rewrite too heavily, or one time too many, and you end up with the written equivalent of a Whitney Houston song; it could be perfectly technically proficient, dazzling even, but you’ll have written the soul out of it. Sometimes it helps to look back at those earlier attempts to see where you lost the spark that was there originally, and to approach your edits again with a lighter hand.
So there’s something to be said for being a bit of a magpie or a pack rat . Gather all the stuff you can, and write all you can; don’t be afraid to save some for a rainy day. Bear in mind that sometimes even what you thought was your worst work probably still has something in it worth saving, especially since you can learn from those hesitant first steps later.