Another insight that’s become a bit of a refrain in my head is something many of us probably learned in a middle school science class. It’s the idea that energy is neither created nor destroyed but able to shift and alter its state. The garden illuminates this idea with its own efficiency; it does not produce waste. Leaves that wither and turn brown are fed to the compost heap, which breaks down into a layer of organic matter that can spread around the plants and feed extra nutrients back to their roots, the soil, and all the other organisms that can work for our plants. This cyclical nature isn’t so different from my writing.
So often, it takes a solid three pages of writing for me to find a couple sentences that feel worthwhile or useable in a longer piece. It takes writing into the heart of a story or idea, a kind of digging, before reaching something fertile, something that wants to take root. But over the years, I have also found that the extra, “waste prose” I needed to go through will reveal itself to be useful down the road. Simply by virtue of writing it is useful, but with a few edits I can also repurpose a stream-of-consciousness rambling to be the apt description for a character, a scene, or piece of dialogue.
Ideas continue to crop up, and it becomes an exercise of curiosity and imagination to find its use.
