Honoring the Unfixables

Over the years, I’ve written dozens and dozens of things that simply didn’t work. Pallid poems, awkward stories, novels that got started then stuck. I’m not talking about drafts that could be shaped and polished, but pieces that seemed immune to revision, that weren’t going to get better no matter what I did.

These are the unfixables. They remain, rough and incomplete, in external hard drives, old floppy disks, even typed pages I hammered out before the days of personal computers.

For a long time, I imagined I would get back to each of them. I thought there was something wrong if I didn’t keep working on every piece I started. When a story or poem didn’t work, I thought the solution was to keep revising until I made it work. If I didn’t, it meant every minute I’d spent on the piece was wasted—or so I thought. How could I work for weeks on a story and then just give up on it?

Click here to receive useful & inspiring writing strategies by email every week—free. 

Now, I have different take on the unfixables. I see them not as wastes of time, but as a necessary part of the writing life—an essential ingredient in my education as a writer. Everything I know about writing came from trudging through bad, unpublishable, sometimes unreadable work. The stories that flopped and novels that never got off the ground taught me invaluable lessons about how to—and how not to—build a scene, develop a character, write dialogue, use detail, construct a plot. They were dress rehearsals. Experiments. Practice runs. The error part of trial and error.

In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg advises writers to move on if a piece doesn’t work. To remember that something else will come up—something better. What I’d like to add is that the reason something better will come up is that you’ve learned from the pieces that failed. We build our skill on a scaffolding of blunders and gaffes. The unfixable stories and poems are our humble teachers and guides, who assist us on our way and take no credit. Look back at them, smile and wave because you wouldn’t be where you are now without them.

[simple_contact_form]