Truth be told, until recently I was not too far off from being the star of one of the “hoarders” reality television shows – I didn’t have stuff in every conceivable corner of my house, but as a writer and artist, I did save every scrap of paper with the idea that I could “make art” with it, given enough time and energy and space to work.
The phrase is “pack rat” and my photograph should be next to that phrase in the dictionary. What’s more, I was setting that fine example for my three children, so therefore, there were four hoarders living together in hoarders’ paradise, cluttering and jamming an otherwise nice house into a landfill.
For various reasons, we are cleaning house now and it has been illuminating and freeing to donate a lot of our things to charity, and throw away our stacks and bags and boxes of papers and bric-a-brac and stuff we just don’t need. I came across some old notebooks from graduate school, and I was so thrilled to see them again. They were friends, long lost in the basement, and it forced me to remember a time when I exercised my brain every day by writing every day, and by using my imagination, and heeding the advice of some sage professors.
The advice remains true to this day. Thanks to Ethan Canin’s W.O.W. (words of wisdom):
1. CONTENT and LANGUAGE are the two most important aspects of any story. Of the two, CONTENT (another word for this is PLOT) inches out language at the finish line.
2. The key to writing a successful story is method acting! DEEPLY IMAGINE the character who is your narrator, then write down everything that his relevant to him or her.
What are you “hoarding” and what do you need to donate so you can get on to the practice of writing every day?
Devi Laskar is a founding member of the Book Writing World. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, is a rabid Tar Heel basketball fan and has three poems coming out in the next issue of The Tule Review (February 2012).