Up: [[Creating a Body of Work]] Created: 2023-01-23 Updated: 2025-12-28 Choreographer Twyla Tharp used to label a cardboard box with the name of a project long before she actually started to actively work on it. As she went about her day, she’d toss anything and everything that might be even tangentially relevant to the new project into the box. When it was time to give the new project her full attention, Twyla discovered interesting connections and new ideas that wouldn’t have been possible if she’d sat down to deliberately plan out her work. Ray Bradbury in his book *Zen in the Art of Writing* also encouraged the use of project boxes, but his approach was a bit different. He wanted writers to write every day on loose leaf sheets of paper and then dump them into a box and not look at them again until a long time — I think it was a year — had passed. Bradbury vowed that the theme of the work and, again, unexpected connections, would appear. Finally, there’s apparently a documentary of A&E that shows J.K. Rowling with a large box of hundreds of notes, maps, sketches, family trees etcetera that she used to plan the *Harry Potter* series. > [!Orbit] JK Rowling > It felt as though I was carving a book out of this mess of notes. And that’s in effect what I did. It was a question of condensing, and editing, and sculpting a book out of this mass of stuff that I had on Harry.