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Transcript

Go to the Slush Pile · The Daily Writer

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Daily Writer, where we share a lesson each day to help you cultivate the habits for writing success.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Once you make the decision to start writing and you do it on a regular basis, hopefully on a daily basis, over time you can build up quite a collection of half-baked ideas and unused little bits of material.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: It might be blog posts, book chapters, social media posts, podcast material, or, in the case of myself, I'm embarrassed to admit, entire books you have written, but never released for one reason or another.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: I call this my personal slush pile.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: The slush pile can be a great source of material when you're looking for ideas or you feel a little bit short on time and you just need something to get you started.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: The term slush pile came back from the days when writers would send manuscripts to publishers and agents through the mail.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, these good people in the publishing world, they get far more manuscripts and books than they can possibly use.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: So they would just put them in a big heap and call it the slush pile.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: The more you write, the bigger your personal slush pile becomes.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I recommend keeping all your work in a location or in locations, if you have multiple locations, where you can easily get to that material and where you have some kind of organized filing system, even if it's just a document that's titled Unused Ideas.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, make sure it's backed up somewhere, like in the cloud or on a hard drive or a Dropbox or Google Drive or something.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Don't ever, ever, ever put your writing at risk of being lost if something happens to your computer.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Always make sure it's backed up somewhere.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now keep in mind that the slush pile is not the same as a trash pile, not by a long shot.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really believe in trash piles for writers.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Anytime you write something, I think it's fair game as a spark for another idea or to be revised and updated later.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: At the very least, if you save stuff that you write and it's really, really bad, you can go back to that later on and see how much you've improved in the future.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: So if nothing else, your really, really bad writing is worth hanging on to, even if it's just for that.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Never throw away any ideas or any writing, because, you know, again, it might come in handy later.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: The great writer C.S.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, one of my favorites, he once said this.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: When you give up a bit of work, don't, unless it is hopelessly bad, throw it away.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Put it in a drawer.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: It may come in useful later.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the rewriting of things begun and abandoned years earlier.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think if a writer the caliber of C.S.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis could live by this advice, it's good enough for me and you also.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Here's your daily question: where do you keep your personal slush pile?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: And have you looked at it recently to search for ideas that you can use?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you've been listening to this show for any length of time, you know that one of the four practices of a great writer is creativity.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And in order to stay creative, you've got to have great input.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where writing prompts come in.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: A writing prompt is a sentence or two that helps you break through creative blocks, brainstorm new ideas, and get back into a state of flow.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Writing prompts are an awesome creative tool for journaling, storytelling, creative writing, stress relief, social media posts, and so much more.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: But the great news is that you don't have to create these yourself.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: We've put together an amazing package of 365 daily writing prompts.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: So every day for the next year, you can have a shot of inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: You can check it out at dailyriderlife.comslash writing prompts.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, and I'll see you tomorrow.