Sometimes, no matter what I do, an article I’m pouring my heart and soul into refuses to take a pleasant form and remains absolute, utter garbage.
I stare at the Google Doc, begging and pleading and willing it to improve, yet…it remains trash.
Have you ever had this experience? What do you do? Do you delete hours of work? Kill your darlings, right?
But what about when you really need to get an article out-the-door to stick to a blogging schedule that you swore you would stick to?
And it’s not like this is the first draft–everybody knows the first draft is trash. This is the fifth, sixth, twentieth draft and it is still garbage.
What now?
Well, I know all about this feeling.
And I am here to help.
Here are six things to consider before hitting the delete button.
1. It Is Better To Publish Than Not To Publish
Somebody famous (Gandhi, I think) said: “To be or not to be? That is the question.”
Well, let me turn that quote on its head for the blogger world:
To publish or not to publish? Answer: PUBLISH, PUBLISH, PUBLISH!!!
Being a successful blogger (AKA a blogger who makes a lot of money) requires frequent publishing. There is no way around this fact.
If you want to win in the blogging game you have to publish, publish, publish, and then publish some more! The blogging game is a game of quantity and scale.
“But quality, lol,” says a blogger reading this article who is broke.
Yes, of course, we want quality! Who doesn’t want quality?
Imagine if the Baha Men refused to release the musical masterpiece Who Let The Dogs Out? on the reasoning that the rest of their album sucked? Then nobody would ever know about Who Let The Dogs Out? Is that really a world you would want to live in? I think not.
The Baha Men knew they had to drop an album along with their smash hit. It’s part of the music game. Just like releasing a lot of articles, even if they are not the best, is part of the blogging game.
PUBLISH, PUBLISH, PUBLISH!
And, as I’ve mentioned throughout this blogsite numerous times: for some unbeknownst reason, some of my greatest hits posts (as judged by Google traffic) are posts that I consider rather mediocre, not my best, and in several instances–trash.
Yet Google loves it for some reason!
That trash article you are working on just might be the key that unlocks hundreds or thousands of new readers! Trust me on this!
PUBLISH, PUBLISH, PUBLISH!
2. Walk Away For 24 Hours
Now that we established the correct path is to PUBLISH, we can still try to make improvements to the draft.
The easiest way to do that is to “metaphorically” walk away from the draft. Put it away, warts and all, and return later. Sometimes that’s all you need to do.
I say “metaphorically” because I know how hard writing time is to come by–it is not to be squandered!
What I really mean is: put away the stubborn draft and move to a different blog post.
Never, ever, never squander writing time. It is precious as gold and is the only thing us writers have in our lives that will allow us to escape from Shawshank.
3. Elaborate The Good Parts, Delete The Bad
Identify what the good is and run with it.
I’ve had trash drafts turn to gold because I identified that 100 word paragraph that was gold out of a 1,000 word crap draft. That’s why I keep coming back to this draft! I think.
Then I build up that one good section and, before I know it, that draft of garbage has redeemed itself and turned into a thing of beauty.
4. Diagnose The Trash Draft With These Questions
- Is there a clear angle/focus?
- Is there a clear benefit for the reader?
- Is there too much fluff?
- Is there a clear organizational structure?
- Is the title boring?
- Does it require more research?
- Do certain parts of the post stumble when read aloud?
- Am I taking myself too seriously?
These diagnostic questions will help point you in the right direction.
5. At least publish it to Medium or a 3rd party platform
If you are 1,000% against publishing the draft, fine. Publish it on Medium or some other platform, but please don’t waste a blog post!
In the blog business, every post counts!
You never know which dumb post (and it is usually a dumb post) that is gonna be the difference maker in driving a ton of traffic.
Even if your post is truly garbage, putting it on Medium can at least drive 2 new readers to your blog, which is better than ZERO readers, ain’t it?
Publishing is the oxygen of the blog business, baby!
Take it from me, a guy with half-a-dozen failed blogs in his wake, blogs that died from fear of hitting the publish button; you gotta PUBLISH, PUBLISH, PUBLISH.
Remember, even in your not-best writing, there may be a particular sentence or idea contained in the post that gives one of your readers a piece of the puzzle they have been searching for. You owe it to the readers!
How many times have you read a crappy non-fiction book, trying to educate yourself on something, and you almost threw the book in the trash because it is so bad…but then your find that one page or that one paragraph or even that one sentence that gave you that valuable piece of the puzzle you desperately needed?
I bet this has happened to you a lot. It’s certainly happened to me.
The book was still garbage, of course. Yet, there was a single gem in it and you needed that gem.
PUBLISH, PUBLISH, PUBLISH!
6. Remember That There Is Infinite Space On A Blog And That All Time And Space Will One Day Be Destroyed
The great thing about a blog is infinite space, meaning it’s not constrained like a print version of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine*, for example.
There is no word limit or word requirement.
You can post a mediocre article, or even a bad article–because I believe you (or I, for that matter) will never improve as a writer without fully going through the writing process, which, in my humble opinion, includes hitting the “publish button.”
Also, if you don’t think the article is worthy of your loyal readers…well, just don’t include it in your newsletter!
And never forget–the crappy article you publish will one day be destroyed! Either when all the Earth’s oceans boil up from an expanding sun or from the Universe’s heat death! Nobody will even know the article existed or that you existed or that humanity existed! Great news! It doesn’t even really matter that the article was published!
So, in the meantime, PUBLISH, PUBLISH, PUBLISH!
*Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine is the best mystery magazine out there, along with its sister publication Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. I just found out, since 2023, both are available in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited Program. If you are a lover of words, the value of the Kindle Unlimited program has massively soared with these two additions. I recommend grabbing a subscription. If you haven’t had one before or haven’t had one in a while, chances are when you click on my Kindle Unlimited Link there will be a deal waiting for you there.