by Karen Shughart
Clean out those closets, put away the heavy winter clothing, cut back the dead flowers from the yard. Donate that dress or those slacks you haven’t worn in years, even if you love them. Shoulder pads are probably gone for good; the bootcut flares you used to wear are back in style, but they just won’t work with flats, and you’ve given away all your high heels. You adore those pretty hand towels for the guest bathroom, but they’re terribly faded and raveled. Time to get rid of those, too.
There’s something about spring that causes us to want to clean up and start fresh. We’re preparing for warmer weather, more time out-of-doors in the sunshine, planting pretty posies that, for month, will delight us with a stunning pallet of color and scent. Spring is a time for new beginnings.
Cleaning clutter out of our homes just goes with the season, but it’s also a time, for me, to clean the clutter out of my writing. The short story I never finished that’s completely outdated, the poem that’s been in a file for twenty years with no hope of being published, maybe it’s time to let them go to make room for new and fresh creative endeavors.
I’ve been working on my fourth book, Murder at Chimney Bluffs, for more than a year and am finally close to completing it. I try to include clues or details in each chapter that are pertinent to the story, but I’d been so focused on word count that I lost sight of the end result.
I decided that as much as I loved a paragraph, description or sentence, it was time to take the emotion out of it and discard what was no longer relevant. As painful as it was, I grabbed a metaphorical pair of scissors and cut about 2,000 words. It was awfully hard, as was giving away that dress I hadn’t worn for thirty years, but doing so opened the closet in my mind to new ideas, words and thoughts that will hopefully make the book more captivating.
So, when snow is melting, the birds are singing, the daffodils have begun peeking their heads up from the thawing earth, it’s time to declutter: my house, my closets and yes, even my writing. Tough as it sometimes is, getting rid of what no longer works has simplified my life and made it that much better.
