The Hoarder’s Writing Shop and Table Revisited

[Way back in the Fall of 2012, I wrote something about how I shepherd writing ideas. Not long after I wrote it, I started using Evernote, as it had a functionality and flexibility I liked. I still use it, particularly as a sort of thought scrap-book from which I can draw at some point later.

With Evernote, a stray thought, a link to a magazine article, and a photograph each find a easily organized platform. This app also makes it easy to connect different devices–a new note I write on my computer instantly arrives on my phone and visa-versa. I find it particularly useful when I travel as I am navigating back and forth from phone to computer continually. It has improved my work flow and my ability to preserve my thinking.I am fascinated when I find something months or even years afterward that I wrote very quickly and without much reflection. A number of the ideas that in the past might have been fleeting get a second life. Many of the scraps become part of something larger. Additionally, I have noted more and more often that a number of these one-off thoughts are not actually one-offs but instead are part of an interconnected web of ideas.

I am sharing what I wrote in 2012 as it captures something that remains true about how I conceptualize my work. Evernote has come to house my writing shop and table. This way of thinking about my approach to writing whether it be for the blog, for some other aspect of my work, or for the poetry collection, reminds me continually that the best writing is not born of a lightning strike of inspiration but from hard work at a craft.]

The Hoarder’s Writing Shop and Table (2012)

–Something from Ecclesiastes…–Some poems I haven’t finished (or rather am not ready to part with)… –Part of an email conversation about the role of technology in an English classroom…–A paragraph I like from a letter I didn’t send several years ago…

I have a Word document that serves as a sort of a giant virtual workshop at the center of which is a virtual worktable where I can tighten the vice down on an idea or topic. Some things in the shop have been there a long time—projects continually pushed aside for more pressing ones. They hang on hooks on the wall next to virtual hammers and virtual screwdrivers.  I thought I would at last get to most of these over the summer—my May ambition to write more seems quaint to my September self.

Somehow they never made it off the wall and onto the table. Some of them probably need to go to the dump, but I don’t quite have the heart to let them go.

Other things are in the shop and on the table only briefly before they move over to the blog. My last entry, for instance, about trading in my pick-up truck was only on the worktable for thirty minutes or so over the weekend before I moved it over to WordPress.

I am writing this entry right now on the worktable. There is a television in the shop tonight, so the US Open is slowing me down.This Word document is more woodshop than office, and its worktable designed more for a hack carpenter than a draftsman.

It is a place where the criteria for inclusion is limited to what may or may not be ever relevant to the creation of something else. In this way it is a hoarder’s writing shop, complete with overfull boxes of conceit washers, idea screws, and pentameter wood scraps.If only my Mac could produce the perfect woodshop smell.