Throw It Away

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Witold Rybczynski mentions the reactions of clients entering his office in one of his excellent essays found in his anthology, Looking Around. Rybczynski, an architect by trade, is constantly creating things and playing with ideas, teasing new things into existence. In the process of doing so, his office is awash in crumpled drawings, slapdash massings of construction paper and tape, the shoals and islands of discarded ideas form the landscape of his workspace.

His clients–who will pay him a great deal of money for his creativity and expertise–are often taken aback: it looks like the ruins left by a five-year-old berserking in a stationary store. They may come in expecting the staid, thoughtful ruminations of a pipe-smoking architect lightly traced out on vellum, but what they see are crayons, frayed cardboard, globs of paste, and garbage cans overflowing with discarded ideas.

It isn’t surprising that we writers are much the same. We ideate quickly with bullet points or run-on sentences or idea graphs. They are very much not novels or stories in and of themselves, but the building blocks of the creative process. 

I wish I looked cool when I was writing. I imagine me in a turtleneck staring out to the middle distance before penning the perfect sentence in my trusty worn leather notebook. Ha. That’s not my reality, no. Instead, I mumble to myself, I gurgle dialog, I pound the keyboard mercilessly as ideas come and hit the keys just as hard to scratch things out and go a different direction. My hair often looks like I’ve been hit by lighting.

And that’s okay.

Part of what we know, us writers, is that it’s vital to throw things away. We try stuff out, and maybe it’s good, maybe it’s close, maybe it’s terrible. The real power is in revising. That’s where the refinement happens. It’s the same thing with Rybczynski and his garbage can full of discarded ideas–they are just as important as the final product because they are what allowed him to get there.

Never be afraid to throw something away in pursuit of something better. Being precious about the writing will choke your process. 

Have confidence and throw away what’s not really working, try things out that feel risky. You are a powerful engine of creation and will always be able to make something out of it.