At the beginning of the year, when things kick into gear after the holidays, there’s teaching and work and all the obligations that come with being a person in the world. To put it lightly, this is not a good state to be in when writing.

When you’re overstimulated, it’s hard to process thoughts. It’s like gorging. The buffet of overthinking. You probably reach times like that pretty frequently—thoughts go from work to writing to family, looping over and over until you feel sick of your own brain.

Even just noticing that pattern can tip you off that you need to take a break, go to the sauna, try to break the cycle. But other times, those intense overheating-with-thought moments are actually good. It’s not always a bad thing, but it’s certainly something that needs to be managed.

Mental stimulants are everywhere. A dog is a stimulant. A child is a stimulant. Work is a stimulant. Writing adds to it too: especially if you’re writing about yourself while feeling stimulated, which makes you even more stimulated.

Are we just describing mania? Are we just describing thinking? Are we just describing the experience of being a human? Maybe what feels like creative crisis is just be the experience of having a brain.

Depression-Era Writer

Not every writer throws away what doesn’t work. Jenny Offill described herself as a Depression-era writer, saving any little scrap of sentence she had written at any point in her entire life. She would go through her old notes and repurpose them as she wrote new books.

You might write an essay that doesn’t turn out very well, but don’t throw it away. You wait until you have another essay and reach a juncture in the writing and think, “Wasn’t there something I wrote about like this already?” Then voila: you snip out the patch from the old essay, patch it into the new one, sew it up real nice and tight. You salvage the jeans, so to say.

This happens frequently: really liking something you’ve written but not being able to use it because it doesn’t fit the piece anymore or isn’t working structurally. So it goes into a folder.

Failures Folder (or The Well)

What you call that collection of half-finished work matters. The name you give it shapes how you return to it.

One name: “failures.” That’s intentionally harsh because there are pieces in there that are good, but you’ve failed the piece.

Another name: “the well.” That’s more neutral. You don’t want to fall into a well, but you certainly aren’t a failure for having one.

Dipping into that failures folder can bring the bucket up with something that works for a new project. It can provide an avenue forward when you’re overstimulated in the current piece. Always look back at things you’ve written in the past if you don’t know where to go.

Nothing you write is ever going to go to waste.

Pulling Up the Bucket

If you’re feeling overstimulated with your life, and as a result, your writing, try this evergreen exercise. We promise it counts as writing time.

Open your desk drawer, your Failures folder, your Recents folder in Word that stretches back months, and choose one of your old pieces at random. Sit with it for a while. Read it. Try to remember what you were going for when you wrote it, and why.

Oftentimes, it can be painful to pull up the bucket. Looking at old pieces of writing can feel like looking at school pictures from junior high. But sometimes you’ll get lucky—the piece that jumps out to you from chance alone is one that you had forgotten about, or maybe this particular paragraph is one you had forgotten you wrote, or maybe this word choice is strange and makes you wonder what you were thinking.

What you’re doing is engaging with your work as a reader. The thoughts that fly through your head as you encounter an old piece of work is the most authentic reading experience you’ll ever have of your own work. Maybe that’s horrifying, but if you sit with it for long enough, you’ll get past the initial revulsion and discover a little glimmer of something worthwhile.

It happens every time.

Get out your scissors and thread. You just started a new writing project.