Unless you have the most massive ego, you will inevitably be displeased by some things you write, especially early in your apprenticeship. The first law of ‘Write Club’ (I honestly can’t believe I wrote that, hohum) is never throw anything away. There are a few very valid reasons for that.
One – we are often our own worst critics. Sometimes, because of inexperience, we just don’t believe we can write anything worthwhile and, therefore, all that we write is rubbish. This is not true. It is true that confidence plays a big part in everything we do. Bad cooks believe they can’t cook. My father believed he couldn’t knock a nail in straight. These are just practical skills, like much of writing, and they can be acquired. We can all put a capital letter at the start of a sentence and a full stop (period) at the end. We mustn’t let our inexperience in grammar get in the way of being creative in our thoughts and how we express them. Don’t criticise yourself, yet.
Second – things can get better with time. When I’d been a trainee journalist for a year or so I was passing judgement on the feature material I wrote. Very often, probably too often, I didn’t really like it for some reason or another. Maybe it didn’t flow or I felt that I hadn’t use the right words or the pace was wrong… However, the news editor and the chief sub never threw it back at me so it must have been up to their standards, which were pretty high. I kept clippings of the features and found myself revisiting them just a few years later and discovered that the stories I didn’t like were actually pretty good, far better than I had imagined them. Sometimes we are too close to what we write. When other people read it, because they have a distance from its creation, they are in a better place to make a judgement. If you leave your writings for a day, week or month, you get that distance and a new perspective, your judgement will be more secure.
Three – there’s something good in there. If we let ourselves enjoy writing, good and creative ideas/words will emerge. It may be difficult to appreciate at first and may be completely lacking if we are trying to force the pace and scrape ideas from the inside of our skull (ideas come when they are ready). But from day one, almost everything you write will have something in it that is worth hanging on to. It may only be a three word phrase in a piece of 100 words. It may the pace you have generated through a combination of the right words with the right sentence length. It may be the delicacy/force that you have created by the use of dialogue. It could be that at the core of a mess of words there is a central idea or theme that resonates with you and is worthy of being revisited. There are countless way in which you may just have captured something special and, if you throw it away, in ten years a vague memory will be nagging away at you, but it’s gone forever.
With experience and confidence you will recognise the things that are worth hanging on to. For the first 20 years, hang on to everything.
