The Art of Keeping and Recycling Your Crap

by Gabriel Proulx

Have you ever written a sentence, a paragraph, a page, or even a complete story, to then only realize that it is worth nothing and that it only deserves to be cut to pieces, spat on, burned and thrown away, suppressed from your memory, hidden from other human beings who could discover – O calamity! – how bad and worthless you are as a writer, for ever erased from Earth like some kind of radioactive junk or an incurable, deadly disease? 

If not, well you are either completely full of yourself and you think that your writing is soon going to trigger an international cultural revolution because it is absolute perfection in the purest and most beautiful sense of the word, or you just haven’t ever written anything. If you are of the first type, you should just stop reading this post since you already know better about writing than us mortals and there is no writing other than your own that is worth taking your time to read. If you are part of the second category, but that you are reading this blog anyways because writing interests you, please just click on the little “x” sign in the corner of this page, turn your computer off, take a piece of paper and a pen out and jot down at least one sentence, one line of a poem, even two or three words, for God’s sake!

Now, if you answered yes to this question, and that you actually like writing, welcome to the club of what we call typical writers. In fact, there is a reason why so many (read: all) of us write crap at least once in a while: because it is normal! However, the place writers tend to disagree is to whether this crap can be of any use or if it should be kept, despite all the disgust that we have for it. I, myself, must admit that, when I write an awful line, a depthless and dry poem, or a story that has the flavour of raw, unseasoned tofu, I normally feel like destroying it by all means. However, with time, I have come to realize that keeping even my worst work sometimes happens to be extremely useful.

Actually, when we write, it’s because we feel the need to express something that we have in our mind, something that we have lived or imagined, a narrative or an idea that we think is interesting, important, unique, or at least that represents us in one way or another. Therefore, even the texts that suck – and God knows how many of these are written each day all around the world, and sometimes even published – still have at least one element that is worth keeping and that could be modified and recycled later. Sometimes, it is just an unusual word that has a fascinating and remarkable meaning or sound. It can be a whole paragraph in the middle of a 9-page story that you wrote when you were twelve that just happens to have the power to expand into a complex and poignant passage of another, completely different story that you are working on later in your life. 

For instance, last week, I found an old poem that I wrote when I was in eighth grade and I almost laughed when I read it; the tone is so melodramatic, most of the images are cliché, the subject matter is very serious but is explored in a puerile manner. However, guess what! In the middle of the text, there were two lines that caught my attention: “Your body’s a field of numb flowers / Frozen to the core, petals like prayers of frost”. Even though I will probably never use those lines as they are, they have some character, which makes me want to sculpt them in the future, and then reuse them in a brand new poem that I will actually like. Had I thrown that bad poem away, I would simply not remember that my brain once thought those two lines. 

So really, keep as much of your writing as you can, because you never know when you’ll return to your old, hidden crap and maybe find, under the layers of literary incompetence, that one word you’ve been looking for to finish, say, the first chapter of your novel.