Although I don’t have as much time
for television nowadays, there was a time when I loved watching reality shows
about anything related to houses. One of
my big addictions was watching shows about professional home organizers and the
crazy people who hired them. I found it fascinating to watch these homeowners
sort through a life’s worth of belongings and place them into neat little piles.
It must have been the psychologist in me.
I haven’t seen one of those shows
in awhile, but one cleaning trick used by the professionals has stuck with me.
The experts would make the homeowners sort their belongings into piles such as Keep, Donate, and Trash. To me, however, the most interesting pile was the “Holding” pile. The idea was to put
anything that you were unsure about into this pile and leave it there for one
week. If you didn’t miss it in that week
then you didn’t need it. The homeowners always hated this pile and argued about
why they needed their old broken lamp or
used coffee maker. However, it almost always turned out that the homeowners
completely forgot about their supposedly precious belongings once they were out
of sight, and later had no issue throwing them away.
Now that I’ve been revising and editing
my manuscript for a little while, I’ve noticed a parallel between decluttering
a room and ‘decluttering’ a novel. Most certainly, there are huge swaths of the
first draft that I can immediately drop into the Trash pile…a depressing amount of text actually. And, every once in awhile, I’ll find a
passage or conversation that I want to put in the Keep pile. Many times
though, I’ve found myself using the Holding
pile. I’ll read over a page and know that certain paragraphs aren’t working. I
tell myself to just delete them and start again, but I can’t bear to throw them
away. I’ll highlight the text, my finger
hovering over the backspace key, and then decide to copy it into another
document instead. It’s such a relief to
know that work is still accessible, just in case I need it. The funny thing is,
just like those homeowners, I always think I’ll need it. I convince myself that I’ll come back to a certain line
again or use a description somewhere else in the book. In reality, that new document is where words
go to die. I’ve never been able to use
anything that I’ve copied over there and it’s rare that I even reread the
passages once I copy them. Nonetheless, I
still like knowing the words are there if I want them.
After thinking about it, I’ve decided that the
process is a little like mourning. By putting the words in my holding pile,
instead of the trash pile, it gives me a bit of time to grieve before I can
move on.
I guess it’s like purgatory for
words.
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