A couple of weeks ago I was nearly finished with a paper and rushed to save it before my traitor of a Dell laptop could give me that perilous blue screen again. Unfortunately when I went to open my “Creative Writing” folder I had run out of titles. No, you didn’t read that wrong, I’d actually run out of titles to name my pieces. And the clock was ticking because my screen could turn that nauseating shade of blue at any moment.

See, I’m horrible with titles. A lot of my pieces start out with what I like to call Friends labels: The Story Where The Kid Dies or The Poem Where the Lines Are Numbered. Other times I just steal from whatever song I’m listening to at the time (same goes for my subject lines in e-mails). And I’ve been known to turn in more than one paper (non-fiction, fiction, poetry, you name it) with “Title” as the title. No joke.

It’s not that I can’t think of titles, it’s just that I’m lazy. I think titles take a lot of thought and I think that anyone who tells you, “Oh, I just knew right away that I was going to call it ‘Diabolical Maximo and the Beaker of Dreams’” is bullshitting you and they can’t be trusted. Seriously, watch your wallet.

So, consequently, I put “temp titles” on my papers and they never get changed and so two weeks ago Wednesday I realized I couldn’t come up with anymore titles. No way. I was tapped out. Some of these documents needed to be deleted but which ones?

It’s at this point that I’d like to extend my hand to you because I know you’ve been where I was too. Whether you were killing time in between checking your MySpace and Facebook accounts or you had to legitimately clean your hard drive (wrote something risqué, didja?) I know every writer has been here. But how do you know when to hang onto a story and when to give up on one? Is there a specific cut off (anything less than 10 lines and send its weak ass directly to the Recycle Bin?) or is it more sentimental (this is the only thing I was able to write through my sorrow after Coco the Sugar Glider died). How do you decide these things?

My first step to deciding was to actually make the decision to pare down some of this stuff I had tumbling around. Whether they were good sentences or not (and I actually found a few good ones when I did my cleaning), you’ll never know unless you open those files up and take a look. It can be scary to even open the documents, I know, especially if the last date on a file is six years ago and you were going through a real angsty phase, reading a lot of Poe, using a lot of Urban Decay Eyeliner in Smoke Out… you get the idea.

Honestly, some of the stuff I had written was embarrassing. I’m an erratic sleeper at best, so you know what that means. Lots of weird, too personal things written at 4 a.m. I mean, really strange stuff. Stuff that I have no idea where I was going or what I had been thinking before I had decided I was going there. I was cringing. Other stuff (probably written after I had gotten a few hours of rest and taken some Vitamin C) wasn’t so bad, but it wasn’t mind blowing either.

After that I took a look at what I was working on right now. No, besides the current blog. Keep up, newbie. Right now I’ve got a creative nonfiction piece, a poem about my brother, and a story I’ve been messing around with for over a year. So basically two active projects.

Friend, do you ever get those perfect phrases or pieces of dialogue that just come to you out of the blue and they never seem to work with anything you’ve got going, but they’re too good to throw away? You try to bend and twist them into, say, the creative nonfiction piece or the piece about a brother and they just upset the chemical balance, you have to go and throw the water out before all your participles and infinitives start floating at the top due to acidic water or something? Me too. That’s why I’ve been hanging onto some one-liners for over two years. They’re like lottery tickets: the next one could be the big one.

It should be noted that the blue screen clock was still ticking. I’m usually good at making quick (rash) decisions, but I was no good here. It was like going to the pound: I’m asthmatic and have allergies so bad that a poly/cotton blend gives me a rash, but I found something cute and adorable in every thing on that hard drive. I couldn’t do it, pal. I couldn’t delete anything. I grabbed my trusty titanium travel drive and started making copies and hoped that one day all of my little snippets, all of my little one-liners would fit into something I’d write. But I also silently prayed that my flash drive would never get into the hands of someone like the Diabolical Maximo or any of his cohorts…