Sort your forks
Why you should write, if only for yourself
Writing is like organizing kitchen drawers.
Stick with me here. When I teach writing classes at the community college and library, it’s around a style of writing, such as kids books or Substack or westerns or food writing, which gives a hook of interest and a focal point for my students.
Typically, my students register to learn about the how: the buttons on Substack or the methods for childrens’ book publishing or landing a gig as a restaurant reviewer.
Spoiler alert: the more important question is always the why and the what.
If you don’t know why you’re writing, or what you want to write about, you can have every piece of the how figured out, and still not be successful.
So, how do we figure out the what and the why?
I think it’s like sorting silverware.
In your imaginary brain-drawer, you have spoons for soup and forks for pasta and knives for the soft sides of pears and the spreading of butter on crusty bread. We might find a few memories in there too: baby spoons you can’t seem to throw out and wine-glass charms from that marvelous Christmas party. You tell yourself that such things are useful: you never know when an applesauce-feeding or a wine-tasting will break out. And honestly, it’s OK to have a silly item or two in there, but fill the whole drawer with them and it becomes a place for almost-gone sticky-note pads and spare keys to long-forgotten locks and four pens from a real estate office you don’t recall visiting and coupons you’ll never use.
If you don’t keep the forks with forks and the spoons with spoons, it is a clattering catastrophe, the kind of drawer that the baby of baby-spoon-fame would have delighted in, but you, as a grown person with eardrums, can’t stand.
The act of writing, getting it on paper, sorts the forks, throws away the lonely mysterious ancient steak knife and wipes out the grit in the corners. Writing doesn’t make the dinner or clean the whole kitchen, but it does help keep a corner of one’s soul from becoming a mess, which tends to help you organize other parts of your kitchen too. For that, it’s worth a try, even if you don’t think of yourself as a person of words.
As you write, you come to the why and the what. Through gentle sorting and exploration, you find that everything in your brain-drawer starts to work a bit better. I think it’s because we need practice saying what we actually might mean, rather than letting our thoughts and worries just clatter around in our brains unnamed.
This is not to say that sorting is easy. I am a writer - by nature, by trade and by habit - but I frequently find myself looking in a very messy brain drawer and thinking perhaps it’s better to watch a short video and leave that mess to itself. As a kid, I made tiny newspapers and books and magazines for my dollhouse and stuffed animals, I wrote long-winded stories about magical dogs and cats and horses. One, about a girl named Clara who runs away from home with her giant (rideable!) black dog, still lives in my mind, as a matter of fact. In college I was told I could write, and boy did I. I wrote constantly - for the Humanities classes I loved, for writing-specific classes in the English department, for literature classes, for the college newspaper, for the literary magazine full of pretentious poems and weird stories and every now and then, an earnest essay from yours truly. Later, I had some writing-specific-jobs, but let’s be honest, every job I’ve ever had has become a writing job, because I can’t help it.
Before shoulder pain and then surgery, I wrote four or five mornings a week. These days, six weeks post-op, I am not writing every day because my body is still not back to normal like I wish it was, and I am struggling to get sorted. My forks are jumbled, and all the spoons I like seem to be missing in action.
Which is not to say that writing regularly means everything is in order and I never cry at the car wash. But sorting the proverbial forks helps me to articulate the what and why of my life and heart. It gets me on the right track of being honest, which nearly always leads to clarity.
The biggest obstacle to such work, is, of course, me. In 2019, I wrote a memoir which I couldn’t sell, which lead to this Substack and the birth of Buzz the Not-So-Brave. I know from experience that the best things happen when we show up for the work, even when the work itself is jangly and hard to force into a tidy box of success. Right now, my fiction project is almost finished (!!!) and therefore scaring the pants off me. I’ve let the silverware drawer of my mind get into terrible shape. It has no organizers and three different brands of forks, none of which fit neatly anywhere. Writing would help me put this back together, make it more of a silverware drawer and less of a catch-all.
The solution is to do the work, as I tell my students. Writers write. It will be loud and obnoxious, but it won’t kill me, it will make me feel better and give me clarity and direction.
But you know what else I could do? Close the drawer with enough force to make it rattle and buy more weird silverware and pile it on the counter without dealing with the stuff I already have, and then wonder why I cry in the car wash.
This is the pep talk to myself, and also to you: sort your forks. Figure out your what and why and ruthlessly pursue it, walking by other clutters to put away utensils which have escaped containment.
Even if you don’t think of yourself as a writer, you won’t regret a few minutes a day to listen to yourself, that little voice which is begging to be heard even in the clamor. And when you do, you might just have a clean drawer, and following, a set table and maybe even dinner. Who knows what might happen if you can get those forks and spoons to line up.
Great analogy!
Great word Dani!