Cleaning for Writers

 

The beginning of the year is a good time for writers to set some goals in their writing life, but it's also the perfect time to clean up your writing area and your writing files. 

I hesitate to say writers are messy people, but it is very easy to let things in your writing area pile up, or spread all over. We all mean to get to those bits and pieces of paper where we wrote ourselves notes. They become buried pretty easily. I would be a bit embarrassed if you saw my computer desk and the little stand next to it. On the whole, I am a person who likes order and things kept neat. But I seem to lose the ability to do that in my writing area. 

So, early January seems a good time to sift and sort, put away and toss. It's on my agenda for this week. Because of other obligations, I'm aiming for Friday. I might do it in dibs and dabs through the week, which might make the chore seem no so overwhelming. 

The other place where we need to do some cleaning is in our writing files. We can approach that job with these thoughts:  

A.  Make a folder of unfinished projects that you promise faithfully to work on later

B.  Delete things that have no relevance any longer. Be select with this. If something is in your files that you have worked on over and over, submitted unsuccessfully over and over, maybe it's time to get rid of it. If you have trouble doing that, put it in the Unfinished Folder and tackle it again someday.

C. Make a list of the pieces that you want to submit this year. Work on the list a little at a time.

D. If you have duplicates, get rid of one. 

If you end this month with your writing area cleaned up and your files reorganized, you should feel pretty satisfied. You'll be ready to get on with writing projects and submitting your work. 

Tomorrow's topic will be Submitting Your Writing.