Just Write

Amy Zhang and your scraps of writing

My dear friend, Arlene Mandell, asked a question the other day that I’ve been pondering. What happens to our scraps of writing?  What can we do with our journal writing and our freewrites? I just read “The Secret Life of a Teenage Author” by Amy Zhang in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Inspiration for Writers. Zhang’s honesty and confession led me to want to learn more about her. Her blog, “A Story of a Dreamer,” is inspiring and delightful. The October 10 post begins, “If You Give an Author Some Chocolate …to encourage her to revise, she’ll eat it. She’ll eat it slowly because there is an art to eating chocolate bars. She’ll try to revise while holding the chocolate bar in one hand, but realize that she can’t revise without proper music. If you let an author look for proper music, she’ll decide that her normal revising playlist simply…