Are you willing to throw it away?

Why writing throwaway is the secret to writing well—and enjoying it

But first: Join us on Zoom for the Prompt of the Week today or any Thursday at 3 pm PT / 6 pm ET. It’s free! No need to register! We start promptly and it lasts an hour (but you only write for 10 minutes). Just click here.

The poet Philip Larkin once opened a book with the words, "This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

This doesn't really have anything to do with what I'm writing about here, but it makes me laugh.

So, what's "throwaway writing"? Not writing that should be thrown away (with force or not). Just writing that you don't feel attached to. Writing that you are prepared to turn the page on, if it doesn't hold anything that appeals to you.

Throwaway writing is the concept that saved me.

I've always had high standards for writing, as a reader and a student and an editor. So, when it came to writing myself, it was super important to me to write well. And boy, did I try.

I so wanted it to be good! And it just wasn't. It came out pompous and leaden and artificial. No lightness of touch, however hard I tried.

That was the problem: I wanted it to be good as I was writing it. I tried to build what I was writing sentence by sentence, so every one mattered before I could get to the next one. I wasn't allowing for the throwaway—the noodling, the exploration, the discovery of what wasn’t already in my conscious mind as “what I wanted to write.”

This is the great thing about writing: it costs virtually nothing to throw material away. You're not wasting a half-ton block of Carrara marble because your mythological hero is coming out too scrawny. You don't have to spend hours unpicking a weaving. You didn't just use up the last of your pigment made of pulverized lapis lazuli imported by mule train from the furthest reaches of Afghanistan.

Did you know that’s why the Virgin has blue robes in Renaissance paintings? Because it was the most expensive, most precious pigment available.

Actually, you're not even throwing it away, like a writer in a movie flinging pages at the wastebasket. You're just making an agreement with yourself that the words that you're putting on the page at any given moment don't have to be usable. If it turns out there’s nothing on the page that pops for you, you're willing to just move on. You don't feel you have to write well every time.

In our Prompt of the Week sessions, we deliberately write throwaway. A few people use the prompts in service of a serious project, but most of us are just playing. We don't care whether we write well or not, because it doesn't matter. What matters is the excitement of seeing what happens when we don’t try to write well, and just riff and explore. This is excellent training for when it does matter. The old habit of moment-to-moment judging is replaced by curiosity.

Trying to write well is, in my experience, the enemy of writing well. It's also the enemy of enjoyment and curiosity and originality. I've found that it's good for me to not write well—which is frequently the case on Saturdays and Thursdays! Some days I do, some days I don't. It's not frustrating. It's not even disappointing any more. Without realizing it, I've trained those reactions out of myself.

I used to be one of those people who hated writing but loved having written. Writing meant angst and struggle and fear of not being good enough. Writing throwaway changed all that. It makes writing fun.

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