Writing Tip #26 - Wasted Words?

 So, a couple days ago I was trawling the depths of the internet, looking for interesting tidbits of information that I can pepper into my every day dialogue. 

Now, because I look up a lot of writing prompts or whatever when I'm bored, often the algorithms that decide which oddly personal ads we see show me facts and articles that have something to do with writing. 

I came across something that stuck with me, simply because if how absurd this 'advice article' sounds. In all fairness to the author, I'm not ignoring the possibility that it was an unfortunate wording choice. The article itself wasn’t all that bad, though it didn’t really fit with the title.

Anyway, the advice was to make sure that you don’t waste your words, as a writer. To make sure your book will stand as a novel, that you’ll be able to make a full story of it, not just some Frankenstein thing that’s missing bits and has an ear where the hand should be and an arm from the top of its head. You get the idea.

That article stuck with me because of how absolutely absurd it is. Waste words? You can’t waste words. Filibuster taught us that as long as you keep reaching for the words, there will always be more to take. They might stop making sense, but saying a writer can waste words is like saying a geologist can run out of earth. It’s simply not possible.

Rant aside, I’ll explain why.

Basically, what I think the article was getting at was wasting time, which is different than wasting words. I’ve probably written more that 200,000 words in all of my stories combined, and I don’t consider a single one wasted. But, there are stories that I’m ashamed to even look at, which could be classified as a waste of the time I spent writing them. 

That’s like saying someone is a waste of carbon, as an insult. Carbon is something recyclable, something that’s always being reused. It’s the same with my stories. Yes, some of them are not that great, some are downright terrible, but none of them were a waste of time or words. Because I learned from them. I learned to spot cliche, I learned about my style, about characters, about writing as a craft. And time spent learning is never wasted.

So write your dumb idea, the one you’ve been ignoring. Waste time and words, because neither your time or your words are wasted. As long as you are writing, consider it time well spent.

So, words can’t be wasted, and neither can time. Your terrible manuscripts are still valuable, and don’t discount the time you spent on them. Writing is never a waste of time.