Writing Leftovers

Usually when I’m revising, there’s a stage at which I realize I have to cut some stuff, either because it’s kind of tangential to the focus of a paper or because the draft has gotten too long. The writing I have to cut might be just a sentence or a paragraph or two; occasionally it’s multiple pages of text. It can be painful to just delete writing that I spent hours working on, that I think explores some good ideas, or that I just really like how I said it. So about halfway through my Master’s program, I quit deleting stuff I liked from my drafts. Instead, I save it for later.

I am not sure exactly how I arrived at the “freezer” metaphor. Maybe it was because I had recently been reading Plato’s Gorgias, in which Socrates compares rhetoric to “cookery,” and maybe it’s because as a grad student who liked to cook, I always ended up with a lot of leftovers. In any case, I created a folder named “FREEZER” on my cloud drive. It’s got a bunch of files with leftover writing that I’ve cut from various projects over the years. I try to label the files well enough to remember more or less what’s inside them, but some are labeled better than others.

Partial screenshot of a file folder labeled "FREEZER"
in all caps, with several MS Word files inside

My "leftover writing freezer" comes in handy in two situations: first, if I am searching for a new project to get started, I can look through the freezer for inspiration. For example, two of the files in the screenshot above have text I cut from other work because it needed to be its own project; I just haven't had the chance to get back to them yet. Second, sometimes when I am working on a project, I realize I’ve already written something related. I open up my “freezer,” pull out some of the contents, warm them up through revision, and use them. Having "leftover writing" can help me avoid writer's block. 

On the other hand, some of the stuff in my “freezer” is probably too old and stale to be usable anymore. Every once in a while, I open up that folder, check the contents, and decide whether or not to throw anything out. Since file space is cheap these days, I rarely throw stuff out, but when I do it’s because I no longer feel bad about tossing it. Putting bits of my writing in the freezer instead of deleting them is an easy way to make my writing and revision process more effective and less painful.

I Have Many Boxes. SO. MANY. BOXES

No, the title of this post is not a clever metaphor:



Why do I have so many boxes, you may ask? I'll tell you.

In ordinary years, my parents and my four brothers with their wives and kids all gather at my house for holidays and family get-togethers because it's bigger than my parents' tiny one-bathroom house. I moved into my house a few weeks before Thanksgiving in 2016 (my first year as a full-time professor¹). Since I had been living as a student for the preceding decade, I had hardly any furniture, but I did have a lot of books. After I finished unpacking my stuff, I was too tired to want to break down all those cardboard boxes and find a big recycling dumpster to put them in.

Then it hit me: I have four brothers and a bunch of nieces and nephews. I decided to keep the boxes in my big empty² family room in the basement and let my nieflings play with them.

When my extended family is not sleeping in the big empty room in the basement, we use boxes to build forts, and we have Nerf wars. After that first Thanksgiving, my nieflings emphatically forbade me from ever getting rid of my pile of boxes or ever putting any furniture³ in that room. Of course, some boxes are inevitably destroyed by the ravages of our Nerf wars, but the supply gets replenished because online shopping is a thing.

Anyway. There was a pandemic. My family hasn't been able to gather for more than a year now, so we haven't had any Nerf wars. Plus I've been shopping online more than in physical stores for the past twelve months, because pandemic.

And that is why I have a ridiculous amount of cardboard boxes in my basement.

I'm really looking forward to getting vaccinated so I can get together with my family again. I'm sure there will be Nerf wars.