The Drivel Folder

datco2014

Johnny writer inspired me to post this - he has a folder he calls "drivel" and I need to get one all my nonsense stuff either gets deleted or hangs around my various project folders looking dejected and generally lowering the tone of the place - what sort of stuff would be in your "drivel" folder - I'll start off - I had a whole sub-plot thing about a voodoo girl with links to the IRA - seriously - and for a while I actually believed it might be useable - talk about deluded!!!

Claudia

Wow - voodoo plus IRA, eh? Can't top that but I've got quite a few drafts of stalled beginnings of stories that deserve to be moved into a drivel folder!

Phots Moll

I have a file called 'ideas' for anything that I started but didn't see through. They range from notes to 50,000 words of a novel (there are three of those).

Johnnywriter

I never thought my good old 'drivel' folder would inspire - a shame the insane ramblings contained within it will never do the same

Perhaps I should give up writing seriously and release a book called "The Drivel Files" you'll find it in Waterstones under humour, or more likely, Poundland under 'reduced'.

Hmm, you've set the bar fairly high with voodoo and the IRA, datco.

I think the worst content is the wealth of awful poetry that would give the Vogons a run for their money.

Lizy

I too have a file marked 'Ideas'

Some of the notes in there are so obscure that I think an alien must have written them - they don't even sound like my ideas.

Or, more importantly, ring any creative bells.

Liz

Lol. I have whole notebooks of drivel. It becomes drivel as soon as i have written it as my handwriting is so bad i can't read it unless I have an idea what it says because I've only just written it. Even then, sometimes I struggle. I don't know why i keep them really, there's no way I can decipher them, but I have this niggling feeling one should keep one's workings at least s you can prove you've written something should there be a dispute. And the workings are muddled with the drivel.

Carol

Yes, I have an ideas folder, and notes in notebooks. Like Patsy it's usually unfinished pieces- the start but nothing else and no idea where it could go.

In my notebook there was one idea that seemed brilliant at the time- but I was having a hypo at the time I started writing it down, and as my muscle control went it became a blur of lines and squiggles and totally unreadable. b-(

Phots Moll

I have this niggling feeling one should keep one's workings at least s you can prove you've written something should there be a dispute.

What kind of dispute? Notes wouldn't prove you wrote it - anyone could jot down a few phrases of your poems and say they were their working notes - or do a plot outline of a novel and say that's what they'd worked from.

Liz

I don't think so. Working notes are very different from 'jottings' you'd have to be very clever to make it look real. Plus i'd have all the other 'jottings' which would be very similar, in the middle of a book.

Lizy

Liz - they say if you want proof you should email it to yourself.

I've never done it but I suppose it's one way.

Liz

Yes. i did that for a while but you have no idea how much space that takes up. Still couldn't get rid of books in case there were working si hadn't worked yet... think i will probably get rid of some now though.

snailmale

I have many folders, most of them drivel. Some of the drivel is duplicated and appears in several folders along with other drivel, although a word or two may have been changed as a result of a forlorn attempt to revitalise a sad piece that was obviously a non-runner right from the first paragraph indent.

It would probably save a lot of bother if I renamed 'My documents' as 'My drivel'.

Liz

I had a look in my computer workings earlier and I have 396,285 folders. Not sure i'm ever going to have time to go through them all and undrivelise...

snailmale

396, 285 is a serious amount of folders. By my calculation, saying you're 45ish, (just saying as a for instance you understand) that means you've been bumbling about wasting oxygen for 16,245 days. Divide that in to 396,285 and you come up with 24 folders a day, one folder per hour for your entire life. That's folders! I bet the Greens might have something to say about folder creation on that scale, it's probably contributing to climate change.

Liz

It probably is. I'm 56. (Or possibly 57?) Suspect some of the folders are already on the computer, but yes, I do have a lot of folders.

Lizy

Let's have a round of applause for sm's arithmetical skills - or is it just his mastery of a calculator at his age we should admire?

Johnnywriter

saying you're 45ish, (just saying as a for instance you understand) that means you've been bumbling about wasting oxygen for 16,245 days.

I don't know why, but I found that interesting.

Did me own maths for my age (40):

I've been alive for 477 months, that's,
284 dog years, or,
14,797 days, or,
2,113 weeks.

I have been alive for 0.04054 millenniums.

datco2014

I had 2 Weetabix for breakfast - actually not true I had 2 Morrisons 'breakfast bisks' which are the same thing exactly except £1.42 cheaper. Squirrels also like Weetabix - my wife occasionally feeds (well she throws it at him really)the grey squirrel that hangs around our back garden with one. We can afford to spare the odd one for Mr Nutkins as we save so much by buying 'breakfast bisks'. (I don't call him Mr Nutkins, I call it rat with bushy tail but my wife and daughters call him Mr Nutkins.

Claudia

@-)

This thread has suddenly taken a surreal turn... (not complaining - it's made me smile)

dora

After reading datco2014's comment, did you mean a cereal turn, Claudia?

Johnnywriter

under the duckweed
frogs dancing to Sinatra
because they like it

There you go, a rare glimpse into 'The Drivel Files'

Bad Haiku is the tip of the iceberg.

Liz

Oh dear.

If you like haiku I can direct you to an excellent teacher, who does live near me and who does it over the internet. But I have to warn you, I got 12 professional poets together to do the course as I was so fed up with children's anthologies filled with poems claiming to be haiku, it was a 6 week course, one poet dropped out i despair, and at the end of the 6 weeks what we knew was that it is VERY difficult, and that most people who claim to be able to write them, can't. They don't even know what they are.

I have a file of drivel haiku.

And one that has THREE real haiku in. That's the sum of my 7 years learning how to write them.

My three are in books.

3 images. The 3rd image makes sense of or illuminates the other two. They have to be images, they have to be nature, there must be no personal opinion - the haiku images are received by the reader and made sense of, you don't tell anyone what it means in the last line, except by the image. And there's about a gazillion other things.

Seaview is brilliant at them.

Johnnywriter

I don't think I've ever sat down and tried to write proper Haiku, Liz.

I studied Basho many years ago, so utterly brilliant, it put me off.

I just like writing 5-7-5 nonsense, it helps when I'm feeling uninspired - I don't know why I keep them really.

Liz

Well, they say something you enjoyed saying. i love playing with words, too. Basho is wonderful. I have about 15 books of haiku, old and new, and I never tire of them. I think they are the perfect poem, so distilled, just the fact that you have to think, and also, when you get one, sometimes the hairs on the back of your neck go up. Fabulous.

It is really a way of thinking, I've been on Renku walks with Alan Summers (the teacher) and when you are in a group and you go round and notice things in a particular way it is much easier, especially with an expert to advise and tell you why one isn't a haiku and one is.

I recommend that if you ever have abit of money to spare, it doesn't cost much and is great fun.