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…until I was caught in the current. k to is using containers to make order. 

Read how he pulls rage out of words:

Here he turns plain words into poetry: 

However, now I want to write about meaning.

The Oxford American Dictionary defines detail as:

1a: “a small or subordinate particular.” 

That’s just a detail OR it’s all in the details.

Sue William Silverman wrote in Fearless Confessions:

Janet Burroway in Writing Fiction: 

Sue William Silverman, in her book Fearless Confessions, wrote: 

Can you catch a detail today? If your life includes reading, writing, and books, then it’s likely filled with piles of books and papers and other things you’ve cut out or printed for ideas and then there are all the little notes for inspiration and the notes of daily reminders and the cool rocks you picked up on the beach and…

Clutter can grow anywhere. It’s something you have to constantly work on, like the mail, because it keeps on coming.

That’s one of the reasons I love a hotel room. It’s usually devoid of clutter. I always take all the little tent notices about the cable channels and saving a change of linens and stick them in a drawer as soon as I arrive.

Speaking of little things I cut out, I have one that says, “Clutter is that stuff you don’t notice, use, or care about until it’s time to get rid of it…What if you need it someday? Why did you buy it?…Enough is enough. Clutter clouds your mind, trips you up, slows you down, and devours the stuff surrounding it.” Would I rather be rid of all this stuff? Yes. Can I get rid of it? No. Now that it’s here, these things are important to me. I am buying less these days–not fewer books, well maybe even fewer books, but definitely fewer things.

I found a great post about clutter at Essential Prose—Unclogging Your Creative Space. There’s an interview with a “professional simplifier” who suggests taking small steps to de-clutter, and that as we do, “We become more aware of how stuff comes into our lives, and how much time and energy it takes to manage it all.”

It’s not that I’m messy. I know where everything is, and everything has a place. But the space for me in my study is getting smaller and smaller. 

As the last days of summer float by, I’m thinking about reclaiming control of my days. I want to read more and write more, lose fewer hours to Twitter and Facebook, the internet in general.

Social networking does have a place. It helps me stay current with the latest articles on writing and books. It helps me feel connected to the writing community. And it’s a way to let others know what I’m doing. As Lori A. May pointed out in a recent post I discovered on Twitter, “For a writer, it’s not only about writing.”

“I am in a limbo that needs to be patterned from within….this problem of ordering a day that has no pattern imposed on it from without.” Again May Sarton.

Last week a friend and I were brainstorming about how to order our days. First we made a list of deadlines and everything we wanted and needed to do. Then we made daily, less-than-daily-and-more-than-weekly, and weekly lists. Finally we talked about what shape we wanted the mornings, afternoons, and evenings to take.

“That was what I was after–a daily rhythm, a kind of fugue of poetry, gardening, sleeping and waking in the house.” Yes, May Sarton.

Lori May eschews the word schedule as antithetical to writing. She refers, instead, to a plan of attack. I like that. I also like fugue for its sense of interweaving of parts, for its writerly rhythm. So yes, I am working on a plan of attack, in order to create my daily rhythm–a kind of fugue of reading, writing, blogging, connecting, and living.