My Paper Trail

                  By ROSEMARY LORD

D’you ever forget what you’ve ordered online? I ordered a ream pack of copy paper. I was surprised because about 2 hours later a ream of 500 sheets of white paper was delivered. “That was quick” I thought. Even for Amazon Overnight. Except it wasn’t.  I’d ordered that paper two days ago – and promptly forgot. Oh well, so now I had two reams of copy paper. A writer can never have enough paper, I told myself.

As a writer, there is nothing better than to hold a fat wad of copy paper in one’s hands and know that, like magic, it is suddenly going to be covered in your very own words.

But I think I’m becoming a bit of a “clutterholic” where stationary is concerned. It was when I thought I was running out of paper – then discovered that I wasn’t – that I realized it was high time to de-clutter my stationary stash. Where does one start? Hmmm.

With great enthusiasm, I began to pull items off the shelves onto the floor. The idea was that I could sort through it all and put back only that which I really needed.

There was a lot of it. Knee deep in assorted packets of Easy Address labels, a box of hanging files, another stuffed with manila folders, a slew of tabbed sheet protectors, ‘Avery Clean Edge Business Cards’, and so on. I had many brightly colored folders – with the plan to color code and use specific colors for certain subjects.  But I hadn’t got that far yet, so there they sat. I found five packets of photographic paper – never used.

A large stack of manuscript sized envelopes – no longer needed because we send manuscripts by email nowadays. But I had liked the satisfaction of putting my sacred, written pages in an envelope with a carefully worded cover letter, beautifully addressed and stamped and the satisfaction of taking it to the post office and sending it off with a silent prayer and crossed fingers. Most satisfying.  It is still not quite the same as eventually pushing ‘send.’ There’s no tactile interaction there. Sorry, manuscript-sized envelopes: out you go.

I filled a large box with dozens of superfluous folders, hanging files, the afore-mentioned envelopes, see-through plastic folders. And what was with the multicolored copy paper?    A ream of lime green, another of yellow. Aha! I had a plan! I remember thinking I would print my Lottie Topaz novel on lime-green paper, which would catch the eye of the editors who could not resist pulling my green-colored manuscript out from the ever-growing slush pile of submitted manuscripts.  Of course, this never worked. And I still had a lot of colored paper left over. Into the charity box it goes.

The eleven spiral notebooks I could comfortably justify. I start my writing projects scribbling in such a notebook and fill it with the outline, a plot line, then many pages of character developments, colorful backgrounds, relevant plot through-lines and dénouement thoughts.  But these were all empty. So, eleven times I bought the notebook and had not used them, so that they ended up on the shelf next to the others.  Although, in my defense, on another shelf I discovered a whole stack of well-filled such notebooks, from cover to cover crammed with handwritten ideas, characters, names to use. I did something right.  Except, why were they sitting on a shelf in the cupboard, instead of on my desk, ready to be used in my next book? But eleven abandoned, empty notebooks? Not good.

As a writer of historical books and novels, I do a great deal of research. I was smugly satisfied with the idea that I had organized my research and kept copious copies of articles on historic figures, historic buildings, historic happenings. Problem was that I had obviously found these subjects so interesting that I just had to print them out, save them and file them.  Now I was faced with two boxes of such printouts. On closer examination, many of them were duplicated. Besides, with today’s technology, I can find a lot of what I want on the internet. I saved only a few of these – in the bin with the rest of them. I said a quick “sorry” to all the trees who had given their lives to support my paper clutter addiction.

I found a whole stack of papers marked “for filing.” Glancing through them, they were clearly not interesting enough to have been filed, and I could not see why I kept them. So, they were gone, too.

And then I looked into the box-files, where I had stored many years of handwritten notes, hastily scribbled on old envelopes, paper scraps, on the reverse side of something else I’d written. What was I thinking?!  That investigation into my stationary cupboard was quite overwhelming and I knew I had to get a grip on it.

I have a new friend at the Woman’s Club who is the ultimate in techie-nerdiness. He persuaded me to get a scan-copy machine and showed me how much easier and quicker it is to scan things I need to keep, or interesting articles I want to read when I have time. Now I can access those papers, research articles, my copious writing notes and half-finished books wherever I am – on my laptop or even on my phone. And they only take up a quarter-of-an-inch-square on my desktop. Who knew? And, because I am still a bit leery of all this techno-wizardry, I still copy everything onto flash drives, just for safe measure.

I hate to admit it, but my endless trail of paper collecting has forced me into the scary world of technology, if only to save the trees.   But I still cannot resist a lovely clean notebook or legal pad, with pencil poised, so I can unleash my imagination and create a whole new world for myself and my readers. And this is where the paper trail continues.