Words Fail Me Read Online Free

with one system. If you're comfortable with file cards, stay with file cards, even if some well-meaning person gives you a gorgeous, expensive leather-bound journal. And keep the cards in the same spot, so that reaching for them becomes automatic.
    Once you've made a note—whether on a file card, a page torn from a notebook, or a slip of paper—store it in a handy place. This is your stash. Just as a farmer has seed and a carpenter has lumber, a writer keeps a stash of material—promising words or phrases, news clippings, or idle notions.
    The way you organize your stash depends on your personality. If you're one of those systematic types—all right, admit it—you might use an accordion file, with related notes neatly sorted by subject. My own notes tend to
accumulate like heaps of nuclear waste. Eventually they reach critical mass and I have to transfer them to manila folders just to get my desk back.
    But no matter how you arrange your stash, don't make a fetish of it. You can be tidy later, when you start writing. And by all means, don't get too orderly and start throwing notes away (unless they say only "Mahler"). An interesting observation might not be relevant at the moment, but it could be perfect for some future writing project. Use it to start another stash.
    Remember that the point of keeping a stash is to capture your ideas as they come. So for now, relax and don't be obsessive (just compulsive). This isn't work—not yet. It's pleasure.
    Ages ago, when a childhood illness or a rainy day kept me inside, my mother used to let me play with her button box, an old fruitcake tin full of buttons in all sizes, shapes, and colors. Quite a few had been snipped from cast-off clothes and still had bits of fabric attached. Many were oddities: a big pink rhinestone, a carved wooden knot, the "eye" of a deceased bear. It was great fun to dump them out and arrange them in imaginative patterns. Sometimes I feel much the same pleasure in looking over a stash of notes before beginning to write.
    But back to the project at hand. The organized writer does not digress!
The Third Degree
    By now you have a healthy stack of usable material. Don't plunge into it right away, though; stop and think for a moment. Interrogate yourself:
What
do you want to say,
why
do you want to say it, and
how
do you want to say it?If you're not clear about these three things, take a walk—maybe a long one, or maybe only around the room—and think some more. And loosen up, for heaven's sake. You're just thinking.
    Say the neighbors have chosen you to speak before the local zoning board about a proposed toxic dump the city wants to build on your block. For starters, give yourself the third degree: the what, the why, and the how.
What do you want to say?
The city should not build a toxic dump on my block.
Why do you want to say it?
Because we'll all turn green, property values will plummet, and there's a better spot across town.
How do you want to say it?
By presenting statistics on projected mortality rates, on residential resales in Chernobyl, and on the scarcity of registered voters living across town.
    For the less civic-minded, here's another example. You're writing a magazine article about your grandmother on the occasion of her hundredth birthday. Again, run through the big three.
What do you want to say?
Gran is a specimen of living history, from the days of gaslight and horse-drawn carriages to space travel and cloning.
Why do you want to say it
?Because through the eyes of the elderly, we get a new perspective on the century.
How do you want to say it?
By using Gran's own words, along with old letters, diaries, and scrapbooks.
    Even fiction should be subjected to the test. Suppose you want to write a short story about high school sweethearts who meet again at their fiftieth class reunion.
What do you want to say
? Former lovers look forward to rekindling the old flame, but end up wondering what they
ever saw in each