Discarded Furniture

when it's hard to admit your work is trash

Oct 20, 2023

Article voiceover

1×

0:00

-5:57

For some reason, there is a lot of discarded furniture on the curb in my neighborhood lately. It’s like one person did it, and then other people thought, “Hey! Yeah! That’s a great idea!”

I am forever pulled in by a sign that says “free.” If there is a chair, or a desk, or a box of mismatched mugs, I can’t help investigating. Free stuff! Gifts from the universe!

Yeah, but the stuff that everyone is dragging to the curb is crap. I mean it. I’m trying to be open about it all (free stuff!), but it’s hard to imagine who is going to take an upholstered chair that is patched where a cat attacked it, and smells faintly of pee. And, now, has been rained on. Twice.

A rendering of some of the things I’ve seen dragged to the curb recently.

I do get it, though. The chair, the particle-board nightstand, the plastic bin of rice cakes (really), I get why people don’t want to bring them to the dump. They were good once (except maybe for the rice cakes). They were bought with money. They were in the house, maybe for a long time, and lived with you in there. You shared a laugh in that chair! You wrote in your journal and rested it on that nightstand! You had rice cake ambitions!

But at some point you have to let it go. And when I say let it go, I mean GO. All the way. Get rid of it. It’s work to bring it to the dump. You have to fit that huge thing into your car. You have to pay to hoist it into that big dumpster bin. And there’s part of you that feels guilty for throwing it away, like the chair will have its feelings hurt.1 So you muscle it out to the end of the driveway, tape on that FREE sign, and think, “I bet SOMEONE will want this.”

Ok, Julie, fine, we get it, why are you talking about furniture?2

There is a similar thing that happens with writing. I have so many picture book drafts stored on my computer that I worked so hard on, for months, but which are not good enough to submit to anyone. And it’s hard. I still save them, in case someday I figure out how to make them work. Some of the dead drafts on my computer represent a half day of work, and some of them are the result of months and months of work, and still I never got them right.

They don’t take up much space on my computer, except maybe the psychological space of seeing so many more folders for failed drafts than for successful ones. I’m glad I don’t have to make the decision to delete them forever, to take them to the metaphorical dump.

It can be hard, to accept that a story isn’t working.3 When I put so much of myself into it, so much of my time, and I know it’s not good enough, it feels like, “well, ok, so do I suck as a writer now then?”

What I need to remember is this: the failing is the writing. Every failed draft is a house made of sticks that teaches me how to build, until I stand back and realize I’ve finally built something out of bricks. (Or, I suppose, in this case, the failed drafts are built out of rice cakes, and the successful ones are built out of…well, they’re still built out of bricks.)

For so many years, I would show my early drafts to everyone, hoping they would say, “This is incredible! You are a genius!” I didn’t know yet how to tell they weren’t good.

It’s interesting to me that my critique partners and I don’t swap every story we write now. We don’t need to. We don’t need someone to tell us when something still needs work, because we know it ourselves. That’s what building all those houses out of rice cakes will tell you.

Last week, I was working on one of the drafts I wrote during the Short Story Project. I typed up my longhand draft, read it over, and thought, “Wait, maybe this is fine just as it is!” I had the immediate urge to send it to my agent. She could give me her read on it and tell me it’s fine!

Which would have been dragging a ratty chair to the curb and hoping it would be someone else’s treasure.

I mean, sure, this story is fine. It’s fine. Do I want all my books to be stories that are fine? Heck no. I want them to be mind-blowingly amazing. A huge part of my job as a writer is taking a story from fine to amazing. I know it’s possible. And I also know it’s work, and there’s still a big part of me that rebels against that. I want to wave my Fine Draft around and say, “I wrote all these words, isn’t that good enough?”

No, it’s not.

A very hasty messy black ink sketch of a chair, next to a photo of the same chair. The chair in the photo is wooden, and has what was once a woven cane seat, but the seat has come apart and now looks like a terrible nest. Like a messy sketch, really. — Maybe you think my drawings are quick sketches. They're not. They're actually incredibly realistic portrayals. Here is a photo of one of the chairs next to my drawing, to prove it.

It takes me at least 12 drafts to make a story good, sometimes many more. I should never send a third draft to my agent. I know there will be a point for me where I think, “I’ve taken this as far as I can,” which is a completely different state of mind from “This is fine.” If I’m not on a deadline, I can leave a story for a week (or more). Most of the time, I think about something else I want to finesse during those days off from it. I will admit that I do the, “Is this good? Is this done?” cycle with almost every revision round, which comes from wanting to be finished with a manuscript. It’s ok to want the story to be done, but I might as well have it be done right.

Yesterday, I saw someone had dragged one of the garbage chairs (a hard wooden dining chair) over to the bus stop, and was sitting in the chair to wait for the bus. This is a great use for a curb chair! Suddenly I went from scowlingly thinking, “Another chair on the hell strip!” to being so happy to see someone’s old chair put to use. So while some chairs (and some drafts) will never be salvageable, some will be. Some will show up in a different form. What was once a dining chair is now a bus stop bench. Like that chair, stories need time to be revised into the shape of their final, mind-blowingly amazing, form.

The Short Story Project

We have successfully wrapped up the Short Story Project, and I’ve heard so many positive things from all of you about it. The most common feedback I heard was “This got me to write something new, and I haven’t been able to do that in a while.” If you missed it and are interested in participating, you still can! All the posts and links to the short stories are here, and you can become a paying subscriber at any time to access them (plus there is a large preview of each post available, if you want to poke around a bit before deciding).

Thoughts and Links

I had a great time visiting the Santa Cruz area the first week of October, doing a book tour with Driscoll’s Berries for the book I wrote with them. These events are so super fun, since they are a partnership between Driscoll’s and Reading is Fundamental, and the kids each get three books and a container of berries. Here is an article about it in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, where I inexplicably said the phrase “Berries on ice cream are a pretty rad snack.” (I go to California for five days, and suddenly I’m using “rad” unironically during a professional interview.)
Did you know my mom has a Little Free Art Gallery in front of her house? It’s like a Little Free Library, but with art. They are very cool! There was an article in the Portland Press Herald recently about all of them around here (my mom is Sylvia Thompson).
My amazing friend Carter Higgins is now selling prints of some of the illustrations from her books Circle Under Berry and Some of These Are Snails. A book-plus-print would make such a good new-baby gift.
Rebecca J. Gomez
had an interesting essay recently about the post-2016 proliferation of preachiness in picture books.
I love this essay from
Amy Stewart
about a New Zealand sheep farmer who changed his mind about an opportunity that presented itself, which has me thinking all about being open minded about whatever comes my way.

Books I read recently and loved

Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.

I listened to the audiobook of Maria Bamford’s new memoir, Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult, and loved it (maybe most especially the chapter about The Artist’s Way).
Adam Rex
has a new chapter book, The Story of Gumluck the Wizard, and it’s hilarious. Get this for all those kids you know where after you see them, you think, “that kid honestly has an amazing sense of humor.” You know the one.
Like a Charm by Elle McNicoll is so good. Recommended for all your magic-loving middle school friends.
My two plane reads to/from California were Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. King and The Kids are Gonna Ask by Gretchen Anthony. I loved them both!