Spelunking me

It’s time to go spelunking through my own ideas. The picture above is a photo of my notebooks. I’ve got work notebooks, journals, writing books, notes for my novel — they are all there. Years worth of stuff.

That cheap wire shelving rig I’ve got them in got busted up a little while back, and I finally reshuffled the things inside it and fixed it last night. As I did so, I flipped through a few of my old books. Inside the front cover of one of my novel’s notebooks, I had written: “Focus on the evidence.” In other words, when describing a space, focus on describing the details that someone has been there or lived there, rather than describing the shape of the furniture or the nature of the light. I wrote it because I think “fousing on the evidence” gives a writer an opportunity to use description as a way to reveal character.

It is hard as a writer to decide what to describe and what to leave out, and it is good to have guidelines for yourself like this one. I really like this one. I wish I hadn’t forgotten about it.

These notebooks are filled with ideas like this as well as ideas for stories, poems and essays. My brain tends to forget things I write down, perhaps assuming that there’s some sort of order beyond chronological order to all this matter. Unfortunately, there’s not.

I would like to find out what I thought worth remembering, once upon a time.