Clear Your Decks

Not everything we start is worth finishing.

The practice of writing is also practice. And practice/rehearsal/training involves mistakes, screw-ups, wrong paths, poor choices and loss of interest. Dancers don’t save videos of every rehearsal. Artists throw away plenty of sketches. Yet writers often work and rework a piece to death, hoping the next draft will finally be the one that gets published, sometimes stopping ourselves from writing something new, because we have to clean our writing plate before we can get up from the table.

Most published writers have at least one manuscript in a drawer. Maybe they’ll come back to it one day, but more likely they won’t. It was a learning book.

As writers, we’re sold on the value of perseverance. Just do another draft. Just keep working. Send another query, another submission. One day you’ll break through. Sit down and finish. Now. Today. This week. In fifteen-minute increments while waiting for carpool, or in one wild coffee-fueled weekend.

I will get to the end of this sentence, this paragraph, this page. This essay. This book.

But there’s value in quitting, too.

Maybe next writing session is a good time to pull out something you gave up in despair and take another look at it with a cold editorial eye. Perhaps there’s one sentence in there worth saving. Perhaps there’s a whole new piece based on the third paragraph. Maybe you’ll get lucky and the whole thing’s nowhere near as bad as you thought when you walked away. If there’s truly nothing you can find in there worth working on, you have two options: send it to a friend and ask if there’s anything they think is worth working on; or toss it.

Seriously.

Hit delete. Crumple up the pages for recycling. Burn the notebook. Put it in a file marked “Dormant.” Clear your decks and make room for something else you want to write. Get the unfinishable crap off your desk and call it practice. Be grateful you learned what that piece taught you and move on.

In your 2022 writing practice, dig out the pieces taking up your brain space and give them one more try. Be a beautiful free-spirited artist, exploring every possible avenue for this idea that’s not quite working. Be a tortured soul contemplating the horror of the page not living up to what’s in your head. And then sit your ass back down and write to the end of the page. Set aside a day, or a week, or whatever interval works for you to finish your shit. Pick up a piece and decide if you want it or not. If you want it, finish it. See what it feels like to do whatever it takes, to revise or seek help or break it apart and rebuild…or let it go and move onto something else you want to finish.

Clear the space for new work by letting go of the hundredweights of half-pages that once seemed like a good idea. Trust that in your head, in your heart, in your skill, there are more ideas—hundreds, thousands of them. Some of them are half-finished on the page; some of them are hiding under the weight of that thing you feel obligated to finish. Let it go.

Sometimes the space for what you want is filled with what you’ve settled for. Don’t settle for half-finished.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. Want writing news, events, and upcoming webinars? Join the A-List!