Cris de Borja

I’ve started doing a thing when I write a draft. If I cut something out of the section because I start going in a different direction or what I wrote feels out of place, I’ll cut-and-paste that phrase or sentence or paragraph into a bull pen at the end of the section document. Taking a cue from Deviant Art — the online free archive of “amateur” artists — I call this bull pen the Scraps.

Now I don’t have to shut up my internal editor. She’s quite helpful, for me, after all. I can create something that keeps flowing, a nice, clean document.

Sometimes, nothing at all grows out of the Scraps. Then they get dumped into the Notes document for the work in progress. If it’s a short piece, I leave them on the next-to-last-version.

Tagged: writing process