By Kim Pittaway

It was a slushy Saturday in January, and I had a number of solitary hours tacked onto the top of a busy convention week to spend wandering in New York earlier than heading house to Canada. The Met beckoned.

I had no explicit paintings to tick off a listing of must-sees, and I may need missed the canvas that captured me if I hadn’t sidestepped a darting toddler. However then, there it was: a darkish picture stretching virtually seven toes by eight toes, that includes what the cardboard on the wall described as “an imposing and ambiguous mound centrally positioned towards a darkish backdrop.” To me, it regarded like a portrait of a large stone pill, its face scarred with age, flecks of blue peeking via and hinting at a hidden and presumably happier previous. The title made me chuckle: Guano (Menhir). Guano isa synonym for excrement, particularly the shit of seabirds and bats, shit that’s particularly valued as a fertiliser due to its excessive nitrogen, phosphate and potassium content material, parts that additionally as soon as noticed it used to supply gunpowder. Nutrient-rich and presumably explosive: that was intriguing.

As was the artist’s course of. Judit Reigl, who fled Communist Hungary in 1950 (after eight failed makes an attempt) and ended up in Paris, had a behavior of reusing her unsuccessful work as drop cloths, which “grew to become saturated with pictorial matter and had been trampled underfoot,” in response to the curator’s wall card. Reigl didn’t merely choose the cloths up and hold them as artwork although: she used do-it-yourself instruments to excavate, scrape, and form what she rescued, turning her discards into one thing new.

The method made me envious, the concept of combing my discarded phrases for reuse, reshaping. Photos of writers’ drafts from an earlier age, handwritten edits over typescripts and pen scrawls, floated to thoughts. My discarded phrases had dissolved within the ether, word-processed into invisibility, leaving simply closing drafts smooth-faced and prepared for presentation to the world.

However had been these discards actually misplaced? And what can be the worth in retrieving them anyway? Would they be nutrient wealthy—or simply shit?

Did it matter?

Poet, memoirist, and trainer Diana Goetsch contends that writers—in contrast to painters, musicians, and different creators—usually fail to have interaction in follow. We lean within the route of product somewhat that course of, engaged on a narrative, an essay, a e-book, somewhat than taking the time to follow the foundational abilities that can in the end enable us to “carry out.” So why not use our discards as an excuse to follow?

Excavate

Discovering your cast-offs is step one. Quite than specializing in misplaced snippets of textual content—the paint strokes on this analogy—look first as an alternative for the half-finished canvases: deserted partial items, rejected submissions, the V4s, V7s, “draftdrafts” of your pc recordsdata. Nonetheless connected to their authentic potentialities? Go away variations the place they sit and replica them over into a brand new folder as nicely. Suggestion: hold it process-focused—possibly name the folder “Play.”

Scrape

What about these snippets, the phrases that appeared pretty however not fairly proper for that very last thing you had been engaged on? Begin a brand new doc in your “Play” folder—possibly name it “Scrapings”—and hold it open as you edit future work. Paste excised bits over because the temper strikes you.

Form

And now comes the enjoyable. Dip into your folder and play-practice. Some recommendations:

• Bait your hook: Open one among your excavated recordsdata. Select a web page at random. Scan it for a phrase or phrase that hooks you. Use that phrase because the immediate for ten minutes of hand-to-the-page steady free writing. Executed? Spotlight a phrase or phrase that significantly intrigues you—and use that as your subsequent immediate for ten extra minutes of writing.
• Redact your textual content: Open one other excavated file. Print out a random web page. Utilizing a marker, “redact” textual content to create a discovered poem or phrase set. If that’s the case impressed, use these phrases as a place to begin for brand spanking new piece.
• Think about a previous…or future: Working with fiction? Pull a personality out of your web page and subtract or add twenty years to their age. Who’re they now? What do they hope or know that the unique model of them didn’t? What potentialities have opened or closed? What does this newly aged model consider the individual you’d initially formed—and what would that authentic consider this alternate? Alternatively: whether or not with fiction or nonfiction, take a look at your setting and dig into its previous. What was this place like ten, fifty, 100, one thousand years earlier? What does its previous let you know about its current?
• Choose a phrase, any phrase: In your Scrapings doc, choose a phrase or phrase. That is your new vacation spot—give your self 100 phrases to jot down towards it, together with your chosen phrase or phrase because the endpoint of your writing.
• Argue towards your self: Scan your recordsdata or Scrapings doc for an assertion or conclusion—a degree you had been making an attempt to make. Now, set your self the duty of counter-arguing: why is that assertion wrongheaded, incomplete, naïve? Discovering it onerous to jot down towards your self? Undertake a persona, a personality who would argue towards you, and write of their voice.
• Put the backgound entrance and centre: Search for a bit of context or background, or a secondary character or bit participant in a scene. Pull that individual or materials into the foreground. What occurs if that’s your focus?

Has your play-practice fertilized the seed of an essay or the event of a contemporary character? Has a brand new concept gunpowdered its technique to the fore? Whether or not, like Riegl, your once-discarded drop material develops into one thing gallery-worthy or stays merely a device for tidying your inventive house, one factor is for certain: it’s not guano anymore.
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Kim Pittaway teaches within the MFA in Artistic Nonfiction on the College of King’s Faculty in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is the co-author, with Toufah Jallow, of Toufah: The Lady Who Impressed an African #MeToo Motion (Steerforth Press, 2021), which the New York Occasions E-book Overview described as “riveting” and “propulsive”; and, with Dr. Samra Zafar, of Unconditional (Collins, 2025). Go to her Substack “I Have Ideas” exploring writing craft.

Tagged: Jusit Reigl, recycling writing, revision prompts