Reduce, Reuse, Renew.

A million years ago, when I was teaching grade 7 social studies, there was a unit on ecosystems and the environment. That was in the mid-eighties, when the concept of recycling was just making its way into the public's consciousness. I remember the text book defining recycling as the 3 R's: reduce, reuse, and renew. Reduce the amount you use and subsequently reduce the waste and preserve nature. Instead of discarding things, reuse them whenever possible. It certainly saves the landfills and our natural resources. And, lastly, renew the resources. For every tree that is cut down, plant another.

Now, almost thirty years later, recycling has become a way of life for most of us. We rinse out tin cans, bottles, jars, and milk cartons and put them in the blue box. In also goes paper, plastic, and cardboard. We use cloth bags to carry groceries -- over and over again. We are conscious of turning off lights and avoiding peak hours when running appliances. Toys, baby equipment, and children's clothing get passed round and round from one household to the next. People are composting and car-pooling. It's hard to say if we can undo the damage we've already done to the earth, but at least we have acknowledged there's a problem. And, as Martha Stewart would say, "It's a good thing."

It struck me as I was drifting off to sleep last night that writers are great recyclers. To my mind -- in writing -- less is more, so I'm always conserving words. I have a friend who says of every 4000 words she writes, she keeps 400. I'm a step further along the recycle road. I only write the 400 to begin with. But that's just my style. For those who spill everything on the page at the outset, editing is key. Epic manuscripts are reduced to readable novels.

As for reusing things, writers are born thieves. Anything and everything we see, hear, or otherwise experience through others is likely to appear in a novel someday. Moreover, they say there are only three truly different plots out there, so we writers are recycling them all the time. Add to that the fact that many books are blatant retellings of well-known stories or paradies of others, and you can see that writers are masters of reusing.

Renewing takes many forms. We renew ourselves when we write. We renew ideas through the way we rephrase things. We renew old stories like a decorator refurbishes a room.

Yes, we writers are very good recyclers. In our hands, what's old is new again.