5 Tips on How to Use Your Unfinished Blog Posts to Help You Write New ones
By: Gregory D. Welch
Tags: Self Improvement, Productivity, Writing, Inspiration, Creativity

5 Tips on How to Use Your Unfinished Blog Posts to Help You Write New ones

What to do with all the blog posts that you started and never finished

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

My approach to writing is a little bit messier and chaotic than other writers.

I believe in progress over perfection, forward momentum, bouncing between projects and constantly growing and improving. But this approach to writing lends itself to several unfinished posts piling up in the drafts, and that’s fine, I have space for it and it doesn’t hinder my current or future writing.

In fact, it helps it.

If you’re like me, you probably have a stack of unfinished posts laying around too. This post is for you, and to help you answer the question of what to do with all this raw potential. Because that’s what it really is.

Keep reading to find out what I mean.

№01 Combine and turn into a new post

One great way to make use of all the sort-of-started-but-didn’t-finish blog posts you have piling up is to take a couple, or take several, and find ways to combine them.

Sometimes this will work easily, and sometimes it’ll take some effort on your part.

I’ve found several older unfinished posts that perfectly compliment something I’m working on but needed a little something to feel finished, to feel polished. These older pieces are great sources, either in entirety or with key passages, to perfectly fit the dry parts and difficult parts of current work.

More often than not, we writers write on specific themes and ideas. We come back to these same topics over and over, exploring for greater understanding and also to teach more deeply on the subject. This means that all the unfinished posts were likely some kind of attempt to do the same or similar. And if so, then they likely have some good lines, solid passages, or some perfectly fitting contribution to your latest attempt at the same or similar subject.

This is a win-win for writers, and proof that you really shouldn’t delete things in haste. Let your work sit, even if it feels like it fails short, or you just couldn’t find a way to finish the piece. You never know how useful those words might be to some future pieces.

№02 Find their common theme, combine and turn them into one new post

As was mentioned, we writers tend to explore common themes in our work. Sometimes our unfinished pieces will complement each other well enough to come together as one new piece entirely.

When you feel a bit dry on inspiration, or some piece you’re working isn’t quite panning out for whatever reason, take time to hit pause and explore your collection of unfinished work.

You may find something to help finish or carry your current work along, as we discussed in the previous point. Or, and this can be a fun diversion from the frustration of your current work, you may find some unfinished work that can work together.

Here’s what I do:

Copy the first piece, and create a new document, paste the work there. Copy the second, third, and however many others and paste them over as well Be sure to leave plenty of white space between the copy-pastes, you need wiggle room and room to experiment, and find connections Play around with what’s there, copy lines and passages, paste them into the empty spaces, see what can run together, and take a measure of the shape of the whole Work at it until you have something that begins to look more like one piece instead of a sewn together blog post version of Frankenstein’s monster Rinse and repeat

The creative lifestyle is a constant push to stretch your creative barriers, to find new experiments and to not be afraid to try new and different things. And if you followed my steps above, even if the new piece crashes and burns entirely, it’s ultimately just a copy of earlier work, and the earlier work is still safe. No harm, no foul.

№03 Find their theme, turn them into a series

Follow the same steps from the previous point, except this time, look for the theme that connects them and look for ways to make a series.

It’s a simple trick, but sometimes understanding how your work connects can become its own inspiration and driving power in helping you complete individual posts. Seeing these individual pieces as part of a series helps you see the questions that are driving the collection, and understanding these questions helps you see what is left unsaid, unanswered. Finish these pieces then becomes a simple task of saying what’s left unsaid and answering those questions.

Plus, once you have the series finished, you have several pieces on one common theme that tie together instead of the one you originally sat down to write. It’s a solid win for you and your efforts and a great way to stretch yourself and grow into a more capable writer.

What’s more, your confidence grows too, and I have yet to meet a writer who doesn’t, from time to time, need a little boost in their confidence.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

№04 Learn from them

This might seem like the easiest of tasks on this list, but it’s deceptive in its complexity and challenge.

When you come up against your unfinished work, have the courage to ask why you didn’t finish this work. And then with each answer, you come up with, keep asking more questions of yourself. There are few skills more powerful and better able to transform you and your work than that of honest self-reflection.

Explore why you didn’t finish a piece, look for patterns, and gauge where your interest waned. See if you can better understand these things and then take note if you’ve felt or experienced them recently or in current works.

Learn your lessons, apply them, and grow into the writer your work needs and deserves.

№05 Finish them

Sometimes, all your work really needs is time. And some pieces need more time than others.

If you’ve read enough of my work by now, you know I’m a big fan of letting your written work sit for a while before editing or continuing it. I usually do this from one day to the next, but I’ve had some unfinished work that took well into and beyond a month to finally find the missing parts they needed to be carried to completion.

Finishing your unfinished work can be some of the most challenging and difficult work you do. But, it’s also the most rewarding and satisfying. There’s a simple joy in finishing your work. And what’s more, there is no better way to grow as a writer than to finish your writings.

Next Steps

Stop deleting your work, play the long game, invest in the unfinished work you’ve started but couldn’t quite bring to a finish for whatever reason. Every so often, take a look at this collection, find your next piece there, find some inspiration from something you once had great momentum and passion behind, or find several pieces and find a way to combine them.

The point is this: Don’t be so quick to delete, sometimes your work just needs to sit a while longer, and you need more thinking-time to grow and develop these pieces and explore the powerful potential they already have.

My challenge to you is to explore your unfinished work, see what’s there, what you can work with and start breathing new life into it.