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. Of course, these individuals get far more manuscripts than they can 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 in a location, or locations, where you can easily get to it, and where you have some kind of organized filing system, even if it’s just a document that’s titled “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 anything 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.

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

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For new writers, one of the most surprising elements of the craft is how much editing and revision it takes to produce good work.

Until you get into writing as a serious hobby or a career, it may seem like writing should just come out clean and ready to publish. But experienced writers know this is not the case at all.

Effective writing doesn’t happen by accident. First you create a rough draft, then a solid first draft, then a second, third, and final draft. These drafts can vary depending on the project, of course.

As writers, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to revise and change our writing. But we rarely reflect on how our writing changes us.

John Irving said, “Half my life is an act of revision.” He was talking about the actual act of revision, but there’s a deeper truth here. The time we spend in editing doesn’t just revise our writing. It also revises us.

As we grow and develop in our craft, we change. We grow. We become a new and hopefully better version of ourselves.

This is scary and a little intimidating. But it’s important to stay open to change. If we don’t change, neither does our writing. Like a bottle of fine wine, we should become better and more nuanced as we get older. Make it your goal, day by day, to become a better version of yourself.

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