She put a page of monologue notes into the draft on her computer and then crumpled the crisp yellow paper and let it drop at her feet. Another page, same thing. One after another she crumpled the hand written notes after she added them to her story. It felt so good to make progress a little at a time and to hear the sound of destruction as she dismissed used up ideas. Ah. And what to do with the little pile of crumples? She rocked in the old stuffed chair where she worked on her deck. Aimlessly she tossed the pages over the rail onto the garden, letting them fall with the breeze. Food for the compost pile. Paper is good for compost, right? Aren’t our ideas worthy of decomposing and nourishing the food we eat and the muse that drives us to create? Ideas and words and stories grow like straberries, and mustard, and chard, and weeds. They thrive in manure and mud. She watched the wind lift a page over the garden fence and carry it off across the river, down the valley, over the hill, into the ocean, and down the throat of a bad-child-eating-sea-monster. Every story knows where it should go. A writer needs know when to let it wander, not that it’s gone stray, just finding its way.
Sky Blue Daze 