Once you make the decision to start writing, and you do it on a regular basis (hopefully every day), over time you will build up quite a collection of half-baked ideas and unused pieces of material.

It might be blog posts, book chapters, social media posts, podcast material, or in the case of myself, I’m sorry to admit, entire books you have written but never released for one reason or another.

I call this my personal slush pile. The slush pile can be a great source of material when you’re looking for ideas or get a little short on time.

The term “slush pile” came from the days when writers would send manuscripts to publishers and agents through the mail. They would get far more manuscripts than they could possibly use, so they would put them in a big heap called the slush pile.

The more you write, the bigger your personal slush pile becomes. I recommend keeping all your work on a location, or locations, where you can easily get to it. You need to have some kind of organized filing system, even if it’s just a document that’s title “unused ideas.”

The slush pile is not the same as a trash pile—not by a long shot. I don’t believe in trash piles for writers. Anytime you write something, it’s fair game as a spark for another idea, or to be revised or updated later. Never throw any ideas, or any writing, away because it might come in handy later.

C.S. Lewis said, “When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier.”

If a writer the caliber of C.S. Lewis lived by this advice, surely it’s good enough for me and you also.

Question: Where do you keep you personal slush pile, and have you looked at it recently to search for ideas you can use?