7 Reasons To Quit Garbage Writing
By: Timmy Brain
Tags: Writing Life, Thinking, Writing, Quitting, Reasons Why

7 Reasons To Quit Garbage Writing

Stop Writing and Start Reflecting

Image by Gerardo Gómez from Pixabay

Garbage writing is an overbeaten advice for dealing with writer’s block. Write a chunk of crap then give it brutal pruning, says the advisor.

Pen any thought that dances across your mind. Keep punching the keyboard till your fingers ache. Quality, they say, is born of quantity. Just write till your writer’s block disappears.

Unlike speaking, where you can hover around sounding grandiose and saying absolutely nothing, quality writing requires deep reflection and concrete messages. The message is as important as the medium.

If you can’t reflect, write, and rewrite your piece, then your writing blows the whole point. Don’t write for writing's sake.

More than any other means of communication, writing commands the public perception, dictate the truth, and alter lives decision. Thus unsolicited writing can be harmful to writers and even more deadly when made public.

If that’s not enough to scare you off the famished road, here are seven solid reasons you probably should reconsider garbage writing your way off writer's block.

It Is Not Deep Work

Garbage writing is not deep work.

Deep work is meaningful work. Deep work is intentional, duly, and dutifully engaged.

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It provides a sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship.

In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport emphasize that deep work is the superpower in our increasingly competitive twenty-first-century economy.

Writing whatever flashes through your mind is the archetype of shallow works. Roaming through thoughts to write whatever it is that pops out lacks all intense and intensity. It is the sought of work without focus.

It is not satisfying, neither can it be fulfilling. It lacks all advantages and accounts for no meaningful progress.

Deep work allows your art to contribute to the greater good. Shallow works add up to nothing in particular.

Writing for writing’s sake does not necessarily add to the body of literature you are crafting out of your writing career. Fact is: it will largely serve nobody including you.

It Might Crash Your Self-esteem

When all you write all day are random thoughts, your motivation suffers and it goes on to hurt your self-worth. You lose confidence in your work.

Art ceases to amuse you. The artist in you falls sick.

You will dread in a lonely world. You might feel detest and amount to nothing. In a short while, you might begin to consider yourself a failure.

It is not uncommon that writers commit suicide. In fact, insanity, addiction, and suicide permeate all forms of art.

Be careful of overstretching yourself to write and thus writing profanity. The backlash can be ruinous more than your discomfort of lacking what to write about.

It Stops Working

After two weeks of writing garbage, what happens?

It stops working. You halt and become clueless about what next to trash out.

Repetitive use of language will bore you out. You will get sick of it.

Then, you are back to the problem you sought to escape from.

You Might Become Addicted

You can also get stuck writing trash after a stretch of time.

New habits become solidified starting from the first 18 days. If you can as well push through enough and keep up with your garbage writing for that long, you might become addicted to it.

At a point, I got addicted to this that I refer to myself as a narrative poet. I couldn’t necessarily communicate well-thought messages anymore that I began to hide under the broad umbrella of poetry.

If fall victim, it might become difficult to rescue yourself out of the vicious cycle.

You Have Nothing To Publish

Writing without a purposeful end amounts to junk. No publication takes junks from writers. No audience will slow that either.

Quite frankly, your introspective self will fight you not to embarrass yourself if you attempt posting it on your feed. Trust me, the lizard brain wins every round of such a fight.

Over time, you are blessed with drafts. Possibly tens of them that are worth nothing. Bad for the eyeballs and hurtful to your ego.

It Doesn’t Serve Your Audience

KO!

You won this time. You push through your trash.

Pinned right on top of every other post, tweeted, and shared on Facebook.

A few hundreds of views rush at it. Good comments or bad ones, engagement is engagement. But then, the guilt is real.

You know writing trash doesn’t add an inch of value to your audience. Nobody can possibly learn from it.

An uncollected stream of thoughts with fanciful words drives no points home.

It Is Not Profitable

The dream of every writer is to get published, control a large audience, and make some money.

All of that is a mirage if your contents failed to tear grounds and break through the crowd.

If your writings don’t worth publishing, it just cannot build an audience either. For the money, forget it altogether.

A Word of Wisdom

Deep work is intense, requires focus, and cognitively demanding. Meaningful writing is deep work.

Don’t bask empty words against blank pages. When stuck, do something worth writing about, then write about it.

You have four ways to attack your writer’s block — why, what, how, and when.

Get a new purpose to your writing — be firm on your why. The clarity of why makes magic happens.

What to write about is what is worth reading about. Conclude on an idea to explore and share your light on. This article is about garbage writing.

Should you list out the key lessons or take us on a chronology of how the world evolves. How is the process to your why and the means to deliver your what.

In his latest book, When — The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, bestselling author Daniel H. Pink provides fresh insights from biological and behavioral science on the hidden patterns of everyday life.

His research offered that through the day there is always a peak, a trough, and a rebound. Pay careful attention to your peak and rebound time to leverage the power of when to engage your writing.

Finally, for consistent meaningfully writing it is best to gather enough experience and as well endeavor to experience enough. Pick up a new book, take on new challenges, figure new ways of doing things, advise a younger you, or share your observation about the world.