As creatives, we know all too well that failure is a part of the artistic process, and that “good” writing is necessarily preceded by an avalanche of very bad writing. This is simply the reality of learning, growing, making, and experimenting. But beyond learning and practice, I’d like to make the case that even your roughest of pieces are worth holding onto. Yes, even when your brain is screaming at you to burn it down before anyone else has the chance to read it.
Keep it all
Sometimes, a piece just isn’t working. Maybe it’s been rejected by every publication you’ve sent it out to, or maybe that piece you were certain was your magnum opus is beginning to look more like a lab experiment gone terribly wrong. Regardless, it’s at this point that most writers get the impulse to scrap it all and start over. I’ve personally written an uncountable number of pieces I can barely stand to look at now.
But instead of hitting delete—hear me out—resist the impulse. Instead, hoard those weird tarnished pieces, the nonsensical sentence fragments, the overwrought poems, the cliches and incoherent brain dumps. Become a literary dragon atop a mountain of crumpled pages and half-full notebooks.
Give your “bad” writing a home
About a year ago, I got in the practice of moving retired poems, prose, and rough idea documents to a folder I have fondly named “Graveyard.” Occasionally, I visit the Graveyard when I’m in need of inspiration or feeling blocked.
At first, this was uncomfortable, these were afterall, not my best works. But now it’s become a habit, digging for small treasures within a genuinely terrible poem, or returning to an old piece I gave up on with new perspectives or methods. I’ve found new life in a lot of writing I originally had the impulse to cast into the abyss.
Recently, I took a wonderful poetry workshop with Jaclyn Desforges called “This Poem is a Compost Heap: Writing decay and regeneration.” (She also recently taught a class with Glossy Planet!) In this workshop, Jaclyn reframed how writing, instead of being neat and clean, can be a site of rot, decay, and decomposition that leads to regeneration and transformation. She encouraged us to rework old pieces, weave poems together, and just generally play in the muck of our writing. I came out of this workshop with a new poem that I genuinely loved and a newfound appreciation for the ways old writing can nourish new work.
So, call it whatever you like—graveyard, compost heap, dragon’s den, storage locker, or even a swamp—but get in the practice of keeping everything you write (even when you find yourself cringing outwardly as you read it).
An extra reason to keep it all
Just in case you needed one more reason to hold onto any “bad” writing, consider just how fluid and subjective these assessments can be. What we label as “bad” one day may have just been a case of poor self-esteem after one too many rejections, a difficult week at work, or excessive comparison to others. We are constantly learning as writers. What you see as “bad” today could have potential in the future.
The point is that sometimes we judge our own writing wrongly. If you resist that impulse to click delete, then that piece you evaluated hangrily after skipping both breakfast and lunch can thankfully, still be resurrected from the Graveyard later. And if it is indeed, “bad” writing, who’s to say it can’t find some new life?
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