Over the last year, I have written a lot of unfinished or unpublished posts for this website. However, as of late, I’ve realised that the posts — or their topic(s) — were fairly interesting and have plucked a lot of them out of my drafts and finally put them on the website.
One such example is my post bashing on the shallowness of the BookTok and Bookstagram trends. The post itself only came out a few weeks back, but the vast majority of the writing contained within it was completed back in September 2023. For whatever reason, perhaps because I feared it was too rant-like, I never put it out. But now it’s up here on the site, more refined and in-depth than it previously had been.
Never delete anything, that’s what they say. Your hard drive backups, your old text message conversations, digital receipts, and so on. Likewise, you should also keep a lot of your writing, even if it’s rather middling in content or not quite up to your standards — you may just look back upon it and suddenly see something of note within it, or spontaneously see a way to get around the roadblock you hit with it however many months ago.
Naturally, if you’re going to blog, you’re going to experiment. If you don’t want your website to become overly formulaic, then you need to think of ways to produce consistent and interesting content, and that necessitates trying new things and approaching new topics.
Sometimes these experiments don’t work out, but that doesn’t mean you have to scrap every trace of them. When you fell off your bicycle as a child, you didn’t stop trying there, so you don’t have to abandon ship when an idea doesn’t immediately work out. Hold onto it, refine it, polish it up for a different audience… it may just take off somewhere down the line.
If you scrap it, then it never has that chance to become anything more than a failed idea. In this post, I talked about how I created my monthly series of TBR posts based on a (now) scrapped weekly series. This is a good example of expanding, evolving, and altering an idea.
Sure, it took about nine months for this evolution to come around, but it came around because I was looking over the unpublished weekly series and thinking to myself, ‘I need to make something out of this.’ If I had followed my gut instinct to permanently delete all these old posts, I may have never come up with the monthly series.
In essence, you can transform an old idea into a new idea, or fix up and polish an idea from its raw prototype. You can easily expand or alter parts, making it much more appealing than it once was. Reinventing like this is a part of blogging, and it will minimise wasted effort if you can eventually repurpose an old into new content. Something will always have to be left on the cutting room floor, meaning it is important to take care in what you weigh up as a good or bad content.
Leave a Reply