writing stash

Knitters, crocheters, spinners, and probably weavers, too, have a yarn stash (or fiber stash, in the case of a spinner). This is like having a stack of books in your to-be-read queue, only it’s yarn.

You got it at a fiber festival (Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival – 59 days, not that I'm counting or anything), or your local yarn shop, or a yarn swap, or on Etsy, or a seller’s Web site. Some of it may be earmarked for a specific project or a specific type of project (ie, you got enough of one color, type, and brand of yarn to make a sweater or a pair of socks). Some you may have bought on impulse because it was pretty, or it was a fiber or brand you hadn’t tried yet or had been looking high and low for and finally found, or it was in the bargain bin and you couldn’t pass it up at that price.

You store it somewhere. It sits there, waiting to be used. Sometimes you look at it and sigh appreciatively. There is comfort in seeing the materials that you can use your hands to work into something beautiful and/or useful. Sometimes you avoid looking at it because there’s so much of it and your tastes have changed and what were you thinking when you picked up that fuchsia mohair?

I’m happy to say that I have a modest yarn stash. Some of it sits on a bookshelf, nicely wound into yarn cakes. And there’s another medium-size box in my clothes closet. That’s it. That’s all I have. I know people who have yarn stashes that take up entire rooms. It possibly borders on hoarding. That kind of stash would make me nervous – there’s more there than a person could possibly knit in a lifetime.

I recently did a bit of de-stashing. I took a large Target bag full of yarn I’m not likely to ever use for various reasons to my knitting group’s yarn swap. And I didn’t come back with any new-to-me yarn, thankyouverymuch.

Recently, it occurred to me that I also have a writing stash. These are to-be-written ideas sitting patiently in a queue. I add to it on a fairly regular basis.

I really like having a writing stash because it solves two problems – what should I write next? and what if I run out of ideas? Without a writing stash, both problems could be paralyzing and lead to Not Writing. At least for me, they could.

The trick with my writing stash is knowing if an idea is still in a to-be-written stage or if it’s gone stale and I’m no longer interested in the idea anyway. If it’s the latter, I de-stash it. None of this “oh, but I might use it someday maybe” nonsense. (I didn’t inherit my father’s and grandfather’s pack rat tendencies, can you tell?)

My one bad habit with my writing stash is that sometimes, unfinished stories go into it, and I try to keep my stash as a place for new ideas to work with, rather than abandoned, half-developed ideas (temporary or otherwise). The same is true for a yarn stash – unfinished objects are still yarn, after all, which is how they find themselves being counted as stash, even though they are in some metamorphosis stage of being turned into a thing.

Right now, I have two unfinished children’s stories and a mostly finished novel in my writing stash. They are sitting alongside two novel ideas and a short story idea, which properly belong in the stash. I don’t want the latter crowded out by the former. I don’t want the new ideas to go stale either, because I like them a lot.

I got stuck on one of the children’s stories. A big hole that I couldn’t fill, let alone get around, and struggling with it was steering me toward Not Writing. I’m starting to get an inkling of way to fix that. The other story was originally written as a screenplay, but I think it will work better as a novel. Technically, the entire story is written, just in the wrong format, and therefore, has to be re-written and added to. The novel is The Phoenix Sonata, which I wrote most of for National Novel Writing Month last year. I kept working on it even after NaNoWriMo was over because there was more story to tell, but then I finally reached the conclusion I’d been avoiding for awhile. It’s a boring story. It’s a bit of a sob story, and it’s still boring. So that got stopped until I could figure out if there was a way to make it interesting and make a reader not want to slap the main character and give her a cheer-up-it-may-never-happen lecture.

And lo and behold, there is a way! I’ve got an idea. (I’ve seen people go pale when I say that.) There’s something I can add to it and some things that can be re-worked to make it interesting. There is relief in this. It was worrying me that I’d put all that work into a boring story.

And when that here’s-how-I-can-fix-it idea hit me, I was already outlining another novel idea.

So there is my dilemma – re-work the Sonata novel or start the new novel? Either way has its merits. Re-working Sonata would mean I’d be able to finish it. I like finishing things, hard as it is for me to do sometimes. However, starting the new novel means something fresh to work on. I’m protective of new ideas. It’s painful when they go stale because you were working on other things. One of them is going back into the stash, though, but which? I've been rolling this around in Morning Pages, but nothing's come forward yet. (Yes, I'm still doing Morning Pages regularly.)

Obvious answers are “work on both” or “alternate each day.” Tried that. I tend to get going with one and all the focus goes there, and the other falls off the radar. I’m the same way with knitting – I can’t have lots of projects going at once. Gives me hives.

So what would you do? What do you do if you’ve had a similar situation? Is a writing stash a bad idea?

Maybe I should have given up overthinking for Lent instead of chocolate.