I like the idea of being organized, with a place for everything and everything in its place. It seems as though it would be soothing and helpful and almost guarantee productivity.
The practice of being organized, however, is to me not merely a closed book, but a closed book trodden on a few times by drunken plow horses (still pulling their plows), dipped in cream of mushroom soup, left for the chickens to peck at, and the remains messily scattered by a tropical storm.
I collect potential character names and phrases that might work into story titles and interesting words that might be springboards to stories. I keep them in two or three squat spiral notebooks as well as in two or three or more files in my computer’s memory. I am not one to place all the eggs in a single basket; if I lose one notebook or computer file, I still have the others and perhaps my literary future will not founder upon the rocks and shoals of happenstance. Then, too, there are the numerous notes to myself on sticky pads and pieces of small, loose note paper.
And just so you know, the great mystery writer Agatha Christie are in agreement on this. Her notebooks make it appear, in comparison, that I have a pristine and rigorous method of tracking my thoughts and notions. So we learn from Christine Kenneally’s delightful article in Slate of a few months ago (published a mere eight days before BP committed a disorganization in the Gulf of Mexico that the vengeful, disaster-wielding God of the Old Testament would have looked upon with some envy. But I digress.)
Christie’s slapdash ways of working should give some comfort to the rest of us who don’t always know what we’re doing either.
Well, I’d have to insist you know what you’re doing. But then I work the way you do, so what do I know?
There is power in organic organization too. It only looks sloppy to the left brain, the linearizer of consciousness. The right brain, mad revel of the unconscious, thinks everything is just where it should be.
Someone once said to me that if you write something down, it cements it in your mind plenty well and you probably won’t need the paper any more. Someone else said important ideas will assert themselves under their own power, and unimportant ones will mercifully fade and waste no more of your time. Combining these two, I write down the ideas I want to remember and then try to forget them.
I’ll let you know whether this experiment works.
“Organic organization.” What a lovely phrase. It’s the one I’ll use the next time my organic-oriented wife tells me I need to clean things up.
You’ve written down (here) your plan to write things down and then try to forget them. That would seem to be your first stop on this road of experimentation.
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Oh, good. It’s working.
Christine Kenneally’s article was grand. Thanks for sharing it!