One of the summer prompts I received from you all was about drafts and ideas: “Write about how your essays and stories begin.” I could write about inspiration and process, and maybe I’ll write more on that another day. But I think what I’ll do for now is simply share a series of sentences, paragraphs, stories, and chunks of words that I’ve compiled into a document that I keep on my computer desktop because they’re all so short and I don’t always know immediately what I’ll do with them, so I leave them in this document and tinker with them. Sometimes I move one of them into a new document to expand it. Some of them will stay small, some of them will become part of something bigger, and some of them will live in this document for a long time while I keep tinkering. Why? Who knows. They’re like a sourdough starters or kombucha scobies . . . except that word chunks left alone for too long don’t grow nasty and sea-creature-like. Have you ever seen a scoby left unattended for months? Words don’t have a stench, praise be.
a journal of brief or incomplete thoughts
a journal of brief or incomplete thoughts
a journal of brief or incomplete thoughts
One of the summer prompts I received from you all was about drafts and ideas: “Write about how your essays and stories begin.” I could write about inspiration and process, and maybe I’ll write more on that another day. But I think what I’ll do for now is simply share a series of sentences, paragraphs, stories, and chunks of words that I’ve compiled into a document that I keep on my computer desktop because they’re all so short and I don’t always know immediately what I’ll do with them, so I leave them in this document and tinker with them. Sometimes I move one of them into a new document to expand it. Some of them will stay small, some of them will become part of something bigger, and some of them will live in this document for a long time while I keep tinkering. Why? Who knows. They’re like a sourdough starters or kombucha scobies . . . except that word chunks left alone for too long don’t grow nasty and sea-creature-like. Have you ever seen a scoby left unattended for months? Words don’t have a stench, praise be.