Each week, I send an email to all the writers on my mailing list with a strategy I think might be helpful to them. Apparently, many of my strategies work because I receive quite a few emails back saying so. Writing my weekly strategies is one of the most rewarding parts of my work.
Several weeks ago, I sent out a strategy email titled,“You are an expert.” In it, I wrote that everyone is an expert at something (actually, we are all experts at many things), and that identifying and acknowledging your expertise is an important step in your writing life.
I had no idea where I’d gotten the idea. All I knew is that I’d been thinking about it for several days when I wrote the email. I believe it was one of my better ideas.
It wasn’t until later that I realized it wasn’t actually my idea. Earlier that week, I’d had dinner with a friend who talked about a project his wife was working on—helping women identify what they were experts at. In other words, I pretty much stole his wife’s idea (although I prefer the words “borrowed” or “adapted”.)
My friend was not annoyed in the least about my appropriating his wife’s project, and I doubt his wife was, either. He’s a writer and she’s married to one, so they both know how writers’ brains work. The simple truth is that we’re all collectors.
Every writer I know goes through life constantly collecting things. Quotes. Images. Facts. Snippets of conversation. Anything I see, read, or hear stands a chance of ending up in something I write. A discussion about whether or not chocolate tastes good with red wine might go into my mental file. So might the sight of a dog sniffing at a rabbit hole in the park, a Facebook post about churches in Ireland, or an article on student loan debt. So it is with most writers.
Marina Keegan, an amazing young writer who unfortunately died just after graduating from college, wrote eloquently about her own habit of collecting:
“About three years ago, I started a list. It began in a marbled notebook but has since evolved inside the walls of my word processor. Interesting stuff. That’s what I call it. I’ll admit it’s become a bit of an addiction. I add to it in class, in the library, before bed, and on trains. It has everything from descriptions of a waiter’s hand gestures, to my cab driver’s eyes, to strange things that happen to me or a way to phrase something. I have 32 single-spaced pages of interesting stuff in my life.” (quoted by Carolyn Gregoire in “How to Think Like a Writer”).
This addiction to collecting may lead you to keep notebooks or computer files as Keegan did, or simply stacks of scrap paper, as I did for many years. But, however you go about it, you need to start collecting stuff now if you’re not already. Do that, and your ideas will never dry up, and your writing will take on new depth and color. When you go through life as a collector, the world becomes infinitely rich.