Monday, January 20, 2020

Memory

Today I tore pages out of one of my notebooks and put them in the paper shredder and threw them away.

You see, as a writer and probably quite a nostalgic person, I feel like I need to remember everything and keep everything. Seriously, it's amazing I don't have a box of grocery lists hiding out somewhere. And as far as free writing goes, I like to keep it all (which is why I use a notebook for that instead of paper scraps, at least as far as I can help it) (and yes this means that my free writing notebook is different from my journal and from my manuscripts) because sometimes I can incorporate some of it later on into one project or another. I might take something completely out of context (usually) or even just keep a sentence or a phrase or an image.

But am I really going to reread every single thing I've ever written down? Probably not. And so do I really need to keep the free writing fragments that I probably shouldn't even be looking at anymore? Some things, some things don't need to be kept.

Memory is a long and winding trail. Start walking down it and it becomes real. Which paths do you want to keep incorporating into who you are and which do you want to lay aside?

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