Throwing away bad work

Today I have wanted to address one of the ideas, Steph Smith mentioned in her book “Doing Content Right”.

She mentioned that you must be putting a lot of reps into the writing habit, but one of the graphs that she showed, discounted and went as far as not even publishing relatively lower quality content.

My first initial reaction was that it was outrageous not to share all your work with the public. After all, it has been proven that quality is too hard to judge, especially from the point of the author of work.

Every huge writer or blogger that I listened to talk about their creative process, keep on mentioning that the pieces that they love themselves, sometimes get no traction what so ever and so get lost under the huge pile of other pieces. And sometimes the pieces that were boring or even borderline throwaway reach number 1 spot pretty quickly.

So when I saw the graph with y column being quality, I was sceptical. How was it judged? What units? Compared to what? Why throw away the perfectly fine writing, even though you feel that its quality is lower?

One of the things I thought about is that I might be playing with fire here.

Writing has been an established field for more than 200 years. There have always been certain ways to do things. There are even full degrees for the field of writing. Maybe it is a common and widespread practice to drop and throw away bad pieces.

But my main question is, why would one throw away a ready piece, when going from bad to great is very easy? There are always editing and rewriting that can help you change your structure and context.

What I have been doing

I think one of the reasons that I don’t bother with throwing away bad pieces, is because I have put a specific way to dialogue with the reader. For me, the talk is much more personal and much more fluent than others.

I have separated the content into 2 main categories. Blog posts and Notes.

Blog posts of course, consist of the best pieces of work that I have written, and they are what gets referenced by me the most. They are also much longer and in-depth than Notes.

Notes on the other hand, is a type of outlet to post less than amazing content. Even though I work on them the same amount of time and put the same amount of effort, sometimes the topic or my understanding is a little lacking, and that is why it goes straight into the Note section. The crazy part? Sometimes what I judge to be sub-par actually outperforms a normal blog post that I put into the main section.

These notes have helped me stop worrying about bad writing and carry on doing this every single day, treating it as any other blog post that I would write.

Writers' block has been a terrifying word for me, and I pray that I would never experience it, I have only heard about it and was very lucky to sidestep it.

I hope that this process of having an outlet for worst than usual work can help you to stop worrying about the quality of your content too much and keep on putting the reps into the writing.

Start now. Get perfect later.

Klim Y