Composting Your Writing

I am starting a compost. What goes in? Egg shells, coffee grinds, rinds of fruit, vegetable leftovers, grass clippings, and leaves. What comes out? A dark soil-like mix that can be used to fertilize my vegatble garden--and without pesticides and chemicals. Not only that, I am not adding the above list of "what goes in" to the local dump.

And all of that is a lot like writing.

When I first started, I was completely paranoid about having every sentence be perfect. The idea of freewriting, or continuing to write without having everything prior to it perfect was impossible for me to embrace. As a teen, I wanted to be a writer, but I probably ripped to shreds HUNDREDS of short stories, feeling almost a deep sense of shame that they sucked so bad.

No, with the wisdom of hindsight, I don't think those ripped-up things were gems. I was right. They sucked. But . . . I now realize that sometimes out of the detritus of crappy writing, something good can come--even a simple sentence I can go on to use--a little like fertilizer--in another book or story.

I've shared on this blog before that I wrote the sentence My first instinct was to look at the corpse as a 17-year-old writer or thereabouts. It was for a story that never saw the light of day, but I always liked that sentence. So I saved it. And saved it. And in May of 2004, it was published as the first sentence of my favorite book I've written, THE ROOFER.

I save everything now. Even stuff that's just the coffee grinds and leftovers of my writing life. Because with some age, some wisdom, some crafting, it COULD . . . maybe . . . become something good.

Thoughts?