Every writer accumulates a mulch heap of published and unpublished work. Assuming that you've retained your copyright and/or other rights to at least some of that writing, then you've been generating inventory all along without knowing it.

How can you think about this material most profitably? To begin with, what should you call it? I suggest that you adopt a business model, and -- at least in the privacy of your home and office, among your friends and loved ones -- call it what any shopkeeper, carpenter, or boat-rental fleet owner would call it: inventory.

Why think of it as inventory? Because concept dictates percept: thinking about it that way will inform the way you handle it. After all, if it's inventory, then you have certain elementary professional responsibilities toward it: taking stock of it, maintaining it, keeping track of it, rotating it, replenishing it.

Does this term inventory bother you? Perhaps because it sound so . . . businesslike? Good. Because, if you're a working writer, you're in business. Time to come to terms with that fact.

Try this: Pick up any published example of your writing, look at it, and say the word -- inventory. Say it slowly, out loud, over and over. Note that it contains the word invent; that's because you invented that essay, it's your invention, something that didn't exist before, created by you, its inventor, obviously an inventive person. So of course it's part of your inventory.

Now, still holding that published article in your hand, pointing at it with the index finger of your other hand, say the word inventory to your spouse or lover, your child, your parent, your pet. Finally, periodical still in hand, step outside your front door and say the magic word to your neighbor, even to a passing stranger. Let them all think you mad. You know something they don't: that you're a person of property, intellectual property, the proud possessor of an inventory.

Milking your inventory is primarily a conceptual process. Although it may involve some rewriting from time to time, and occasional pruning or grafting to reduce or expand an essay's size, you're never facing a blank page; instead, you're working with essays you've already written, often not changing a single word. Your main task in relation to this inventory is a form of mental play: learning how to show your inventory a really good time.

This extract appeared in Between the Lines, Vol. XVIII, no. 2 (February 2000), p. 2, under the title "Sounding Off: Your Work Is Your Inventory." Between the Lines is the newsletter of the New York Local chapter of the National Writers Union.