No, It’s Not Trash (Probably)

“But is it trash?” “Should I just give up?” “Have I wasted all this time?”

These are some of the questions authors ask me, often at the start of working together and even more often in the midst of revisions, when exhaustion and lack of perspective can take over and the temptation to just stop, jettison it all, give up on their whole career, and become a hydroponic gardener somewhere remote and quiet gets louder and louder.

That’s when it can be most helpful to have a writing partner (editor, colleague, writing group) who can help you determine honestly and generously, is this doing something important or is it trash?

How to Know It’s Not Trash

It’s not. That’s all. There, does that help?

But that doesn’t mean that it might not need revision or rethinking. Odds are, it does. In his extremely useful, accessible, and practical book, On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts (2021), editor and writing scholar William Germano posits that all writing — even the first draft — is revision. Writing is the process of figuring out what interests us, what we think about it, what we might want to tell others about it, how we could do that, and then how we could do that even better.

Every time we visit our thoughts, we are, in effect, re-visiting them. If we can think of the process of writing as an alive, generative engagement with ideas, texts, facts, and storytelling, then each and every moment we work on our writing, we are not only building something; we’re creating it and giving it life. Cutting, pruning, reworking, even letting go of material is generative, bringing you closer to the best version of what you want to say and your best understanding of what that even is.

It might not be your best writing or your best thinking (whatever that means), but unless you’re writing only what you think someone else wants to hear with no personal interest in the material, then there is something in your writing that we can keep.

Perhaps it’s a kernel of an idea. Perhaps it’s a whole article. Perhaps it’s what you learn about your thoughts as you do this evaluation.

That doesn’t mean everything we write will be successful, in draft form or free thinking/writing. Not all material should be kept, and not all ideas are aflame with brilliance.

Some projects aren’t going to work, no matter what we try, and it’s a skill to know when to let them go. Yet, even when you release a project, drop an article, or radically rethink your book’s arc, that time is never wasted.

And it doesn’t make that project — or your thinking or your writing or your scholarship — trash.

How to Figure Out If It Might Not Be Working, Even If It’s Not Trash (Which It’s Not)

Have you put together your field resources, learned what others are saying, and are struggling to find a way forward?

Have you stared at a manuscript and found that no matter how you rearrange the material, it’s not coming to life?

Do you have so much material that readers are saying they’re getting lost in the sea, and you can’t see what to cut or how to focus the material?

Is an older version of the project haunting you, making it difficult for you to engage with it in the present iteration and form?

Is the idea itself interesting but the current frame constraining its possibilities and further avenues for discussion?

If you said yes, to any of those questions, your writing is a candidate for cutting, re-visioning, or even dropping the project altogether. Let’s be honest: If an idea is a dud, no amount of even very skilled writing will make it come alive. It’s okay to let it go, to put it aside and start anew — using what you’ve learned about why that project wasn’t working to spark something else that is.

But most of the time, the answer is to shift the project, often from what you think you’re doing to what the manuscript is actually doing (or wants to, if our preconceptions could get out of the way).

And that second thing, it’s usually so much more interesting, deeper, and cooler than what we think we’re doing. It’s not trash at all — it’s potentiality, waiting for us to see it and invite it to come play.

How to Believe It Really and Truly Might Not Be Trash After All

Get an editor! Or a writing group, writing partner, writing coach — someone else to look at your manuscript with an outsider’s perspective and engage with what they see on the page, rather than what isn’t quite there yet or stuck frustratingly in your head.

A development editor can read your project structurally, parsing what work it is doing, how it functions, and what it could be doing. Maybe some of the material will have to be let go for now. You could put it in a folder (I call mine “Detritus”) and archive it for the future. We would keep what is working and help it to grow so that you, too, can see that no, it’s not trash; it’s material waiting to be creatively reused, reclaimed and upcycled.

And if none of this is speaking to you — because, Holli, it is trash — then make a copy of your manuscript and destroy it to your heart’s content. Print it out and tear it up in tiny pieces and throw it in the air. Color all over the draft, glitter it up, and ball each page into its own manuscript snowball and throw them (preferably not at anyone, unless they want in).

Or there’s always the tried and true: set it on fire and watch it burn.

Then go back to your original file and ask, what’s working here? I promise you, something is.