Recycling

Stop applauding. I haven’t gone green just yet. I’m referring to finding new life in dead ideas. Remember all those notebooks I keep talking about, with bits and pieces of stories and books in them that were abandoned for one reason or another and then got stuffed into my closet? The ones that make it tough to get to my shoes? They can be reused, recycled, refurbished, cannibalized. All it takes is the right inspiration.

I might finish a few of these stories someday. Some are better off left abandoned. Others make me shake my head and go, “What the hell was I thinking back then?” For some, the time just wasn’t right. Or maybe it was the right idea, just the wrong execution.

When I do my periodic inventories, I mostly look for half-finished stuff that I can get back to. I’m lazy by nature—that’s why finishing anything takes me so long—and these are the easiest to work on. That’s not to say I discount the rest of it. There might be a scene or an idea or a character or a couple of lines I can use in something else, or use as the jumping-off point for a whole new story.

That’s the beauty of writing: all those words never go to waste. Even that piece of crap you scribbled in a white heat at 4 in the morning after you had that really freaky dream serves a purpose. I believe you can learn more from bad writing than you can from good. Good writing is tough to emulate. Bad writing can be repurposed into another story to become better writing.

This is great if you decide you want to write a series. What concepts, characters or throwaways can be built on to create additional books? Maybe that fragment you tucked away in a notebook, the one that didn’t go anywhere, would go someplace if married to your current WIP. Mashing an old idea with a couple of new ones might just be the thing to kick-start that plot that’s giving you trouble. Pretty much anything can be dressed up and reused. This is why a lot of us have drawers with old screws and buttons in them, and why I have stacks of spiral notebooks cluttering up my closet.

Not that I need more things to work on—I’ve got about four in the pipeline already—but the other day I had an idea. Back when Dorchester still existed in the publishing world, they briefly ran a line of quasi-SF romances. I decided to take a shot at this. Science fiction/fantasy with romance attached is what I like to do.

The project did not go at all well. I suspect the reason was the POV. I kept hearing my female protag’s voice in first person. In a romance, that means I’d have to write first-person sex scenes. I struggle with writing sex scenes, period. Do one in first person? Oy. There are writers out there who can pull it off with panache, but I’m not one of them.

The concept was fine, and I had a nice twisty mystery plot in mind, and a workable quasi-SF element, and a character with a problem and a hunky guy to help her, but I couldn’t make it come together, and I think that fear was the problem. Into the closet it went.

That was then. This is last weekend. I was wandering the YA section of Barnes and Noble, noting the plethora of young adult novels and wishing I had a workable concept so I could join in the fun, when it suddenly hit me: I’ve got that abandoned romance sitting in the closet. The quasi-SF setting would fit right in with modern YA subgenres. Just make the protags about five years younger and ditch the sex and I’ve got a New Adult novel. I can even keep the first person POV. Why didn’t I think of this before?

Because I wasn’t reading Young Adult before, other than Harry Potter. Since the time I set the romance aside, I’ve had a chance to read some of the better, or at least popular, representations of the genre as it currently stands. I believe I could recycle this story into a decent YA/NA novel. The basic idea was sound; I just targeted the wrong genre.

Now I’ll have to root through all those notebooks and see if I can dig up the couple of chapters I completed and see what I can do with them. While I’m at it, maybe I’ll exhume the remains of that fairy tale/Western I started. My haphazard research dug up a market it might work for. This, in addition to the other stuff I’m currently working on, should keep me busy for awhile.

Where do I get my ideas? Out of my “ditch this crap” files. Sometimes hoarding can be a positive thing. You never know what’s in there, waiting for a new coat of paint. Besides, it’s a good excuse to read instead of writing. Told you I was lazy.

Clutter

I have a problem with clutter. I’m not at the Hoarders stage yet, and I’d rather not end up there. But I can be a bit of a pack rat, especially where reading material is concerned. I imagine most if not all writers have the same problem. There’s nothing worse than knowing you read something somewhere in some magazine and trying to find it again. Between that and what I suspect is an inborn reverence for the written and the printed word, I rarely throw anything out if it’s bound between covers or on a glossy page. God help me if a fire ever breaks out in the house.

Part of the problem stems from a move I made about five years ago. I went from renting a semi-detached house with two floors and an attic to owning a mobile home. The house and all its extra room let my packrattitude run wild. I could go on book binges and then stash them in the attic and tell myself I didn’t have a problem because they weren’t visible.

That’s fine for a house. Trailers come with a whole other set of criteria. Space, for one. For a time I considered buying a double wide just so I’d have an extra room for the books. I kid you not.

Fortunately the trailer’s owner liked to do crafts. Since it was just her and her husband, they converted the second bedroom into a work room and the second bathroom into storage space. When I looked in the storage room, it was floor to ceiling shelves. It was like she knew she’d be selling her home to a book hoarder some day. That front bedroom would make the perfect writing room, too, with all my reference material only steps away. I agreed to buy it on the spot.

Long story short, I got my collection crammed in there. I have no idea how. Imagine thirty years of accumulated paperbacks, hardbacks, magazines and sketch pads crammed into a space the size of the average bathroom. That’s an apartment-sized bathroom, by the way. Those shelves, which the owner worried how she was going to get rid of, served me perfectly. There are books stacked on shelving from floor to ceiling and boxes piled up on the floor. I have a narrow little walkway so I can get in. It really does look like a scene from Hoarders in there. If the whole house looked like that, I could probably call the producers and get myself on TV.

The other day I bit the bullet and went rooting through the boxes, some of which I haven’t touched since I moved in five years ago. There are tons of writing magazines, SF mags from back in the ‘80s, and fanzines from my con-going days. Most of it I’ll probably never look at again. Why the hell am I keeping this stuff?

One thing’s for sure: if I ever find myself housebound, I’ll never run out of reading material.

Scarily, that’s not all of it. Remember, I’m a writer.

In my bedroom closet are piles of spiral notebooks, tablets and file folders with every manuscript I’ve sold, drafted or abandoned over at least the past twenty years. I know I have stuff from the ‘80s in there because the files are marked. This is in addition to the stuff in the filing cabinet, piled on the desk in the writing room, and sitting on the hard drives of my desktop computer (the indestructible Troglodyte-1000 from 1990) and my more current laptop. Oh, and then there’s the pile of notebooks on the end table next to the bed. Those are the works in progress. That file changes every seven-eight months as old stories peter out and new ideas emerge. There are never fewer than four spiral notebooks stacked on that table at any one time.

In addition, there are the books and magazines on the coffee table in the living room (so I can read during commercial breaks), the miscellaneous papers on the dining room table (I don’t eat there; I each on the couch), and the stack of bills on the nightstand. Oh, and the wire book rack in the bedroom where I keep the books I intend to read next. In my house, a flat surface without some form of printed material on it is rare indeed. I shudder to think how many forests have had to die so I can clutter up my house with their corpses. Acreage the size of the state of Oregon comes to mind, with maybe parts of Washington thrown in.

Life would be so much easier, and the house less crammed, if I’d just throw in the towel and buy a Kindle. All those books in the book room could be replaced by an object the size of one paperback. A whole library reduced to portability, and a lot easier to dust. But where’s the fun in that?

Someday I’ll screw up my courage and actually go through those boxes and those closets and winnow out some of the crap. I’m not looking forward to that. Maybe I’ll wait until it reaches the point where I need a storage locker. Until then, I’ll just shut the door.