If you want to get the most out of life, discover joy no matter what your circumstances, and have an endless supply of ideas and inspiration for your writing, then I suggest you take up the ancient and powerful Way of the Scavenger.

Scavenging is a way of being, thinking, and living that:

sees the world as trove of pirate treasure

values the broken and discarded

puts to use all manner of things others hold to be worthless, ugly, ruined, or done with.

Scavengers have always existed. They are the dumpster divers, the junkmen, and the ragpickers of the world. They are the ones who survive the toughest of times. Because they know how to make do.

All writers are, I believe, scavengers at heart.

We piece together poems and stories from bits and pieces—half-forgotten dreams, leftover ideas, faulty sentences, fragments of memory, shards of overheard conversation, oddments of things we’ve read or heard somewhere. If you want to do well as a writer, you have to learn to patch together stories, darn the holes in your hopes, and rework your plans into crazy quilt careers.

You may already be following the Way of the Scavenger.

How do you know?  

You’re the one who adopts the scroungy blind dog or ill-tempered, three-legged cat rather than the fluffy puppy everyone else is cooing over.

You keep your office supplies organized in old shoe boxes rather than plastic containers purchased at Office Max.

You turn old flip-flops into planters, worn boots into bird feeders, and outdated phones into wind chimes.

You have, at least once in your life, used a cheese grater as a musical instrument.

Rusted cars; threadbare coats; collections of assorted nuts, bolts, and screws; cracked mugs; broken costume jewelry, eyeglasses, and doorknobs—theses are things of astonishing beauty for which there are countless practical uses.

For dinner, you open the refrigerator and create a delicious meal from whatever falls out.

You call mistakes “gateways to adventure.”

That time you rear-ended a police car? The class you taught with your fly down? The date on which you spilled a bowl of hot soup all over the guy you were trying to impress? They’re all material.

The beauty, the ugliness, the disappointments, the crying jags, the laughter, the sunsets, the hot baths, the calluses and bruises, the golden memories, the purple memories, the oven-burnt finger, the day you couldn’t get out of bed, the night you danced under the stars. All material.

The rejected stories. The failed poems. The unfinished novel. The essay that didn’t come together. The play that was never produced. Yep, material.

If you are someone for whom everything has always gone well and easily, then you can ignore everything in this post. If you are not, start foraging among the broken, unfinished, rejected things in your life and begin to knit them into something new and brightly colored.

Jill Jepson is the author of Writing as a Sacred Path and the ebooklet Calling Up the Writer Within: A Short Guide to Writing at 50 and Beyond, available here. Sign up for her free weekly strategies for writers here.

Photo: Kawanabe Kyosai, "Crow on a Branch" (Brooklyn Museum, public domain)