The unfinished draft folder

I have a folder with forty-some drafts in it. Some are a paragraph, some are a single line, a few are nearly done and have been nearly done for over a year. For a long time this bothered me — a graveyard of unfinished thoughts, evidence that I start things I don't follow through on.

I've come around on this. Most of what anyone writes isn't meant to be finished. It's a way of thinking something through, and once the thinking is done, the draft has done its job whether or not it ever becomes a post.

Publishing is not the goal of writing. It's just one possible ending.

What actually gets finished

Looking back at the handful of drafts that did turn into something, they share one trait: I came back to them more than once, on different days, in a different mood. The ones that stayed unfinished are almost always ones I only touched once, in a single sitting, and then never opened again.

So the folder isn't a failure list. It's a waiting room. Some of them will get a second visit eventually. Most won't, and that's fine — they still did something the first time I wrote them.

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