What to Do With a Piece You Hate
You need to get back to your authentic voice.
You’ve written something and you hate it. Maybe it sounds like a child version of yourself, naive and cloying. Maybe it expresses a feeling you’d rather not have. Or maybe it’s just not living up to the original, soaring vision you had for it.
When there’s a mismatch between what a piece is and what you want it to be, don’t panic. The first thing to do is put it away for a while. Like two people having an argument, you and the part of you that’s fighting with the piece need space to calm down.
The best thing you can do next is show it to a supportive writing buddy, coach, or group—someone you can trust to believe in your work and follow your instructions. Ask them what they like about the piece, and get them to be specific. “This is great!” is not very useful to a writer, but “I love how you build tension in this dialogue” is.
Then tell them what you like about the piece, and the parts of it that you’re most excited to develop (if you don’t have a writing buddy, you can make a list of these things or record yourself talking about them). Talking like this can bring you back to the core idea, feeling, or line of inquiry, that prompted the piece. It can bring you from a “this is crap” framework to an expansive “what might I do with this” framework.
If you’re still not ready to go back to the piece, do something that calms down your nervous system: take a walk, play with your kid, visit a museum, or read a book. When you’re in a calm state, try writing the piece again, without looking at the draft that stressed you out. Approach it from a place of expansiveness and experimentation. Do you need to break with traditional forms to say what this piece wants to say? Is there self-consciousness that you need to set aside in order to write it? This is the time to start trying those things.
Sometimes when we hate something, it’s just because it’s new. We might be working in a new genre. We might be trying to fit something complex into a container (a traditional essay, a narrative poem) that is too small to hold it. Or we might just be trying to say something that is frightening to say. But it’s important not to remain stuck in frustration about your own work.
It’s not childish to ask for positive feedback. Asking your writing buddy or critique group to tell you what’s working is actually a very smart move, if the feedback is specific and focuses on craft. When we feel very vulnerable about our work (which is part of what “hating” it is about), clear, specific, positive feedback helps you get to know yourself as a writer. It also moves you out of flight/fight/freeze mode and back into a creative space where we can live up to what the piece is asking of us.
On the other hand, if we hate a piece and ask someone to tell us everything that’s wrong with it, we go into compliance mode—changing things without knowing why, in hopes of being “good” and getting praise. This way of responding to writing can only take you so far—you can improve on a technical level, but not move into that place of excitement and expansiveness from which authentic, innovative work is born.
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