Recycling Our Words

Having been back in the UK for two months, I’m now preparing to turn my face south again and head back to South Africa where winter is creeping in.

It’s always a bit of a brain shift, but the one thing that is certain is that, where I’ll be staying, ‘Bin-man/woman Day’ is Monday.  As residents do here, people wheel out their multiple bins and bags kerbside to await the arrival of a team of workers who blitz the lot.  The difference is that, in much of Cape Town and indeed South Africa, another team of workers will have checked all those bins earlier in the day. 

Arriving with carts, trolleys and any number of Heath Robinson contraptions, people go through the bins looking for anything they can recycle or sell.  Apparently 60,000-90,000 people are employed to check bins across South Africa, earning R2,900 a month (approx £145 – figures are five+ years old) .  I wrote about this in a personal blog recently.  None of this is comfortable for Westerners but it provides a significant source of income that makes a difference for many living in poverty.

Last time I was walking the neighbourhood on a Monday morning, greeting whoever was around, I began to think about whether, or how often, we writers are as good at recycling our work.

It’s tempting to bin the paragraphs and articles that never quite came together; the half-started novels; the brain-storming sessions that were suffocated or subsumed by other things.  However, I strongly recommend that you don’t delete those scribblings.  Organise them by folders alphabetically, topically, or whatever works for you, but DON’T throw them away.

Even the dreariest idea may be massaged back to life in the days ahead.  You never know when someone or something might trigger an idea that relates to something you’ve already written.

Five years ago, I wrote an article which I pitched to a magazine.  It was turned down, which baffled me somewhat as, even though we can all have moments of delusion, I thought it was pretty good.  It was several months later that I realised the publication had run another article in the same issue, on the same topic but coming from a very different angle.  ‘Aha!’ I thought to myself, ‘No wonder they didn’t want mine.’  It made sense.

Earlier this year, I pitched a similar, though not identical article as the topic had become mainstream again.  This time, it was accepted and although I wrote an entirely fresh piece, I was able to trawl that original one and even copy and paste from one paragraph.  Thank goodness, I hadn’t deleted the whole thing.

So, take heart, take note and see if there isn’t still some life in things you’ve written in the past.  Open those ‘dusty’ or neglected folders and dig to some treasures that still hold life.  You might just find you can do a bit of word recycling yourself.

Jenny Sanders has spent the last fourteen years living between the UK and South Africa. She writes faith-inspired non-fiction: Spiritual Feasting (2020) asks how we can ‘feast’ when life serves unpalatable menus; Polished Arrows (2024), explores the allegory of God shaping us to be fired effectively into our culture and contexts.    

             

Jenny also has two published collections of humorous short stories for Key Stage 2 children: The Magnificent Moustache and other stories, and, Charlie Peach’s Pumpkins and other stories. She is available for author visits and creative writing sessions in primary schools.  She loves walking in nature, preferably by a river, and has a visceral loathing for offal, pineapple and incorrect use of car indicators on roundabouts.