Declutter Your Writing Life
I should have made a Reel for this one
Hi friends,
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been spending plenty of time dissociating from the current state of tHinGS by looking at my phone. I spend most of my bullshit time online (which is different from my ~online for work purposes~ time) on Instagram, and I hate to admit it, but a lot of that time is watching Reels. Reels suck. Reels are the good TikToks from three weeks ago. I KNOW this. But I can’t move over to TikTok because I’m afraid the content will be too good and I’ll never come out. Instead I spend hours a week watching people clean filthy homes and rich, white women scour every inch of their McMansions for their several-carats-big lost wedding rings. (Why are there MULTIPLE cases of I lost my expensive wedding ring in my enormous house accounts???? I am being played, I’m sure.)
Also rich in my feed are decluttering videos. GOD I LOVE THEM. The aesthetic haul girlies are now getting rid of all those half used candles and 400 throw pillows and I AM HERE FOR IT.1 Throw out all the childhood art you’re never going to look at again! You do not need 87 white tshirts! You are never going to use all those purses! Inject it into my veins!!!!
Part of me cannot believe the size and volume of these people’s suburban closets and doom rooms, but that’s just because I live in Brooklyn. And at the beginning of the year, I went through my own decluttering rampage journey. All my tshirts fit in one drawer, thankyouverymuch. A huge stack of books is making their way to the Little Free Library on my block. Ahhhhhhh, it feels so good.
Even if you don’t have the time, inclination, need, or fortitude to declutter your closets or under the bathroom sink, you can do some easy and useful decluttering of your writing life. For some of it you don’t even have to get up from your desk. Here’s where to start:
Stationery and Writing Utensils
Listen, I know you have 54 blank journals. I have even more than that. It’s ok. I’m not telling you to throw them all away. But put them in one central place so you can A: see how many you have, B: find them when you want/need a new one and C: know where to put them when you inevitably buy more. I give you permission to throw away/recycle/donate any empty ones you just don’t want to use. Put them in your Little Free Library or give them to your kids/neighbors/neighbor’s kids or put it on the free shelf at work, especially those branded ones you got a conference or whatever. Just because it’s “good” doesn’t mean you have to use it. Someone else can.
Pour all your pens out on your desk and test which ones work and which ones don’t. Hate a specific one? Relegate it to the junk drawer, where pens go to die. If you have 400 on your desk/work area, redistribute them around the house to all the places you never have a pen. Dispose of the ones that leak, don’t work, or have bad vibes.
Put all your other ancillary writing supplies in a central location. Post Its, note cards, fountain pen ink, printer paper, whatever you use. You don’t need to buy new plastic bins for all this stuff. You know that Good Box you’ve been saving? Use that. Put some stickers on it if you want to cover a logo.
Digital Stuff
This might be a more daunting task, depending on how organized you are with your files. But just go do that thing you know you need to do with all your files. You know what it is. It’s different for everyone. For me, I need to find all my personal writing drafts and put them in one place, whether that’s on my hard drive, Dropbox, or whatever. I need to decide which place is going to be The Place I will save everything. Then I need to go into Google Docs and make a Personal Writing folder so all that stuff (which I’m not going to like download as Word docs and save in The Place) is all together, and when I open a new Google Doc to write something, I’ll remember to put it there.
Have contracts? Put them in a folder named CONTRACTS. Put your headshots (aka selfies) and text of your bio in a place you can find, too. A filled out W9, resume, CV, or other oft-used document can go here, too. Put it in one place!
What we’re NOT going to do is get sucked into a black hole of reading old drafts of half finished projects. That’s for another time. You might stumble upon an old idea that sparks your interest but RESIST its siren call. It’s just there to distract you from your decluttering goals. Come back to it later.
Avoid creating too detailed an organizing system. You can create folders for individual projects, but you don’t need to do that for EVERY project. A project might not get a folder until X milestone, whatever that is for you. Organize it only so far as the first place you think to look for something. If you’re like oh I want to work on that YA novel I started last Thanksgiving, where’s the first place you’d think to look for it? Your Writing folder? Your YA folder? Your Stuff folder? Just do that. Don’t make it more detailed than will work for you.
If you have 500 apps you’ve been using for notes or research or whatever, take some time to open (maybe pay for?) the ones you use the most and delete/unsubscribe from the ones you do not. This might take some juggling to export what you want to keep, but tbh, if it’s something you haven’t touched in months or years, you probably don’t need it anyway. Keep the stuff you reach for the most, even if it’s just Note Pad, and jettison the rest. No magical productivity tool works if you don’t use it. You’re allowed to quit Evernote.
Mental Clutter
I was talking to my therapist this week about how I make tons of lists for everything and the various ways they do and don’t serve me. In the past, I would make a huge list as a way to spiral about how much I had to do. I put everything on it (shower! eat! fill water pitcher!) just to prove I was sooooooo busy and thus needed [whatever it was I needed: rest, attention, a snack]. Those lists weren’t useful because I wasn’t organizing my thoughts, I was wallowing in them.
When I’m anxious now, I make what I call my Big Messy List, which I talk about a lot in my book. The BML is there to catch everything flying around in my mind so that I can see it and put it in its proper place. Sometimes it feels like a waste of time, or an unnecessary delay in tacking all the shit I need to do, but making it a messy list helps me calm down and see what I need to do instead of running around like a hamster on a wheel. From there I will likely make a more organized list and then get some of those things actually done.
You don’t need to make these sorts of multi-tiered lists. You don’t have to make a list at all. But you probably do need a way to capture all your fleeting and intrusive thoughts about writing, and put them in their most useful places (one of which might be the trash). If when you sit down to write you can’t stop thinking about how if you had done this last year you’d have a draft by now (maybe), or if you got your MFA you’d have an agent by now (false), or why bother because you’re X years old and it’s too late (also false), that mental clutter is getting in the way and you need to find a place for it. Maybe it’s in one of your many journals. Maybe it’s pounded into the pavement when you run. Maybe it’s a breath in and a breath out. Whatever box you need to put it in, do it. Get it out of your way. There’s always going to be some of it around, so just pare down to the minimum and figure out where you can put it when you stumble upon it.
Books
You’re probably going to need to get rid of some books. I know! It’s so hard! You can’t buy more books if your shelves threaten to cave in on you. Periodic trimming is always a good idea.
The thing that unlocked this for me was looking at a book and thinking can I just get this from the library if I want to read it later?2 The answer is almost always yes and you can keep your library app handy if you want to make sure it’s available in your area. Some books I want to keep and some books I don’t. This litmus test really helped me shift through what I’d bought and what I was realistically going to read.
And I know it’s hard to give away something you already spent money on. It’s ok, though, to get rid of something that’s costing you more psychic damage than the loss of dollars you paid for it. Or if it was free! You can get rid of free books, too! It’s ok! Someone else can probably use it! Check with your local library before you roll up with 300 donations, but there are many ways to rehome well loved and good condition books. You might even get money for them.
I promise you can give away books, even if you haven’t read them yet. If you’re meant to read a book, it’ll find you again.
WOW this was a long one, so here’s our WAY BACK MACHINE of previous posts, without fanfare.
Call your reps, friends. New Yorkers, call Gov. Hochul and tell her to fire Mayor Adams, the bum.
OXOXOXOXO,
Kate
Not for them to just throw things in landfills of course. There’s plenty of selling, charity, and recycling going on. Don’t at me.
Those of you who only read ebooks or audio and/or only get books from the library and are not drowning in unread TBR piles, good work. Here is your gold star: ⭐
Bad vibe pens are the worst.
I was going to be all superior like, I've got this one under control until I got to the bit about the pens. True confession: I have at least three bags of old pens that have been with me through three major moves because "some of them might still be good." You got me. They are heading to the trash.