Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Pieces of a writer's brain

I tend to leave half formed thoughts all over the place. My brain leaks all over any blank page I find and then sometimes I forget why I wrote something.

Case in point today - I was filling up a notebook with the novella I'm working on and I got to the last page in the book and found this snippet of something:

A strip of yellow police tape adhered to the scratched inner surface.

That's it. Just that on a page. I have no idea when I wrote it or what I was writing about. It must have been important since I bothered to write it down, but I have no idea if it ever made it any farther than this scribbled note.

I'm bummed because any time there's police tape involved, you figure the story has to be interesting on some level. Now the question is, do I save this page and hope someday to find the story it was supposed to go to? Or do I let it go, and assume that whatever the scene was either got written or didn't but that either way, it really doesn't matter?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Save it!

I've got a whole file of disjointed images that were really important when I wrote them down, but now I have no idea what they were for.

Kristen Painter said...

It's good to know I'm not alone. I find stuff like that all the time. I'm sure I knew what I was talking about at some point.

Two Voices Publishing said...

Maybe I should make a scrap box, like I have for quilting fabric and write this snippets down on little pieces of paper so that when I need a stray sentence I can search through and hopefully find one that fits.

Shelley Munro said...

I'd save it, too. You never know where a snippet like that can start the cogs turning at superfast speed. I have snippets all over the place. Sometimes I use them and often I forget they were there. I'm glad I visited today because now I know I'm not alone! It's a writer thing.