My Happy Little Discard Pile

Sometimes, what I write for here ends up “not working”. That can be for any number of reasons: It’s simply too garbled or too many ideas at once, I realize I’ve already written essentially the same thing, the situation that I’m writing about no longer exists, I realize that I’m trying to make a specific annoyance of mine into some kind of generalized experience when it’s not, or what I’ve written ends up evoking the opposite effect of what I was hoping for. Those often don’t see the light of day. At most, a few people whose opinions I trust will ever read it. It’s still useful. It still counts. The parallel in fiction writing are character exploration scenes. Writing exercises like “write a scene where your protagonist is late to a dinner party and just got a flat tire”. A scene that just doesn’t fit. Even your favorite “darling” lines and portions that you (or an editor) realize need to be cut. There’s marketing tricks where you can directly monetize those things (“behind-the-scenes”…