Your Unfinished Drafts Are Your Biggest Opportunities in Writing

Almost 300 unfinished drafts later.

I have almost 300 writing drafts in a folder right now.

Some are nine words long, some are four-hundred, some are over a thousand words that will never see the light of day. They’re either pieces with half-baked thoughts or the writing quality simply isn’t good. Who knows, maybe I’ll tweak some and put them out in the future.

The point I’m trying to make here is that these 300 unfinished drafts could be looked at as failures. However, writing drafts that never get finished isn’t as bad as you may think.

Here’s why having unfinished drafts are okay.

Writing unfinished drafts can be frustrating, especially when you’re pushing yourself to write a complete article every day.

I made a promise to write an article every day for a year — no matter how frustrated I get.

Like everyone else, I’ve had my bad days. Heck, some days I wrote two crappy drafts that I couldn’t bear to read over again. Writing duds is like running into a brick wall.

I’m more content with my 9-word unfinished drafts than the ones that are damn near one thousand words. Why? Because I’d rather hit a wall early in the game than get so close to the finish line only to falter. Not only am I trying to write every day, but I’m trying to publish every day too. One more dud is one less article I can publish.

Then your mind can go a million places after that. You don’t publish, you don’t build a following. You don’t build a following, you don’t get that success that you crave so much. Everything snowballs and you’re caught in a deeper rut than when you started.

My tune changed on this dud dilemma when I realized that not all duds are crappy articles. This leads me to my next point.

Your crappiest articles have a high chance of becoming your most popular articles.

I’ll never forget writing a blog post a year ago about my 5:30 am morning routine.

I didn’t even remember writing it. My mind went blank. I felt like it was just a messy article that I somehow cobbled up from the grave of my mind. I didn’t care for this article at all. I distinctly remember calling it my shit post.

Shit posts for me are posts that I think aren’t quality enough to publish, but I’ll come back to them and spruce them up a bit to publish if I really need something to put out. One day, I scrambled for articles to publish. I found this one lying in the drafts folder so I did some quick edits and threw it into the void.

I wiped my hands clean of it and never thought I’d see it again.

The very next day, I’m on my toilet checking my stats page for kicks and I see over a thousand views on my phone. I didn’t want to get off the toilet that day. A few months later and that article has accumulated over 10,000 views and is my most popular article to date.

Not too shabby for a shit post, eh?

Every article you make, crappy or unfinished, has an equal chance of being your biggest hit.

If you have tons of drafts that are unfinished, that proves you’re not afraid to write on bad days — and that’s a great writer.

I get happy looking at all of the drafts in my folder.

They’re signs that I had horrible days and still kept writing. We all know the famous Thomas Edison story of how it took him 10,000 prototypes before he found the perfect one for the lightbulb. Just think about how long that took him.

Think about how long it takes to write 10,000 drafts. I did some simple math and if you divide 10,000 by 365, that’s roughly 27 years of writing every day! Are you willing to tough out the bad days for 27 years?

That’s probably too big a question to ask.

So take baby steps. Tough it out for a year. Make it two years. Then make it five years, then you’ll know after that.

Don’t get embarrassed by your duds. Be embarrassed that you don’t have enough duds. Duds show that you take every opportunity possible.

Final Thoughts

Having hundreds of unfinished drafts in your folder aren’t signs of failure.

They’re signs that you tried your hardest on bad days and that you’re willing to take every opportunity you can to improve your craft. You never know what a dud can bring to your arsenal if you publish it. So keep writing and who knows?

You might have a hit on your hands.

Get my free writing guide that can teach you how to build a writing habit in 90 days or less here.