I had a ring for her finger and when she found out about you she had a finger for me

It sounds like a country song and I doubt I’ll ever write a country song, but it’s good. So it goes on my list. My list is a simple text file that lives in Simplenote ¹. It has all the lines I’ve wrote and loved but just had no place for, an island for misfit sentences. Lately I’ve been working on a project that been taking these lines and making something out of them. This Essay is part of that project and an endorsement for such a list. A list I thought every writer had. A ‘make longer’ list.

I use the term, ‘killing your babies’ a lot more than people are comfortable with when talking about the craft. It’s necessary to edit out things you slaved over, lived for and loved. Sometimes they don’t fit and sometimes they just fucking suck. The good ones must go somewhere because they have their own magic. A magic you can build on or with. They can be bricks or foundations. You can use them to see how far you’ve come. I’ve cherry picked all the good ones from my list and I’m left with lines that are years old and way past their expiration date. They’re a good reminder of how far I’ve come as a writer and how much my idea of good has tightened.

These things are important for all writers. We need to see where we came from, where we are and have someplace to go when the muse is away.