During this writing retreat, I flew through two drafts of new essays for the collection and then hit a hard stop on the third I’d planned to write. It was to be about the trip I took with Dominik and our nephews to the area where Lake Sr. and his brothers had their peddler’s routes. I was getting fewer than 150 words an hour, as I kept going back and erasing and starting over, and I wasn’t sure why this was so much harder than the other two drafts.
I tried several tricks to make it work. I went in another way, pulling back to family trips to the area when I was a kid as a frame story. I did research on John Henry, who will certainly have to appear in the collection but so far is not fitting in any of the places I expected him to. I even put on headphones and listened to the music my father used to play on road trips, trying to recapture those memories but really just making myself a little sad with missing him.
Finally, after wrestling with one short paragraph all morning, it dawned on me why this wasn’t working: the essay I’d envisioned just doesn’t belong in this collection. Everything about the right way to write about this trip is in a voice and from a perspective that just doesn’t fit the larger narrative. So, I've stuck it in my “failed things” folder (you all have one, right, in case later you want to try to resurrect a piece that didn’t quite work when you’d started it?) and have moved on. This afternoon I’ve gotten a good start on an entirely different essay, so it was clearly the right move. What little information this essay contained that is necessary can easily be tucked into other ones, and in truth it’s a relief to have realized the problem and moved forward.
How do you know when a piece just isn’t going to work, friends, and what do you do once you’ve realized it? Is your “failed things” folder—like mine—the one on your desktop with the most documents in it? How often do you go back and pan for gold? I’m endlessly interested in how other writers confront these dead-ends, because I’m always certain I’m doing it wrong.
At this point, there are way too many things in my "failed folder," though I don't call it that. It strikes me that the way you described this essay is not really as a failure at all, but simply as something that doesn't fit into your current project. Maybe you should reconceive and retitle the failed folder, or you could add a different folder where you put things on hold instead of relegating them to the bin.
But it's great you were able to see the problem and regain your focus on the project you want to focus on.
Do you know how many plants I planted in my garden that I ripped out later or that just up and died? Plenty. All part of the creative process my darling