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Transcript

Go to the Slush Pile · The Daily Writer

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Daily Rider Podcast, where we bring you tips and inspiration each day to help you build habits for writing success.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: For more resources, including your free Daily Rider Starter Kit, visit DailyWriterLife.com.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Once you make the decision to start writing and you do it on a regular basis, hopefully you do it every day, over time you will build up quite a collection of half-baked ideas and unused pieces of material.
• 0:35
  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've written but never released for one reason or another.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: I call this my personal slush pile.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: The slush pile can be a great source of material when you're looking for ideas or you get a little short on time.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now the term slush pile came from the days when writers would send manuscripts to publishers and agents through the mail, and they would get far more manuscripts than they could possibly use, so they would put them in a big heap called literally the slush pile.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: The more you write, the bigger your personal slush pile becomes.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I recommend keeping all your work in a location or locations where you can easily get to it.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: You need to have some kind of organized filing system, even if it's just a document that's titled Unused Ideas.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one important thing to keep in mind here is that the slush pile is not the same thing as the trash pile, not by a long shot.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really believe in trash piles for writers.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Anytime that you write something, it's fair game as a spark for another idea or something to be revised or updated later.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Never throw away any ideas or any writing because it might come in handy sometime later.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: C.S.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis once said, When you give up a bit of work, don't, unless it is hopelessly bad, throw it away.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Put it in a drawer.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: It may come in useful later.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the rewriting of things begun and abandoned years earlier.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: I love that quote.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: So if a writer the caliber of CS Lewis lived by this advice, surely it's good enough for you and me also.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Here's today's question.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Where do you keep your personal slush pile and have you looked at it recently to search for ideas that you can resurrect?
• 2:31
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• 2:37
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• 3:00
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• 3:05
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• 3:12
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• 3:15
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• 3:18
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• 3:28
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• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening, and I'll see you tomorrow.