In the summer of 2018, I got addicted to the wastebasket. Tossing a poem into it gave me a buzz—like a puff from a Marlboro Red. So, I threw away a short story—more intoxicating, like a shot of Camarena tequila. You know how these things go. I wound up sliding a 300-page memoir into the wastebasket, blacking out for weeks, waking up with my jeans around my ankles in a room full of one-eyed cats.

“How did I get here?” I said.

“Meow,” said the cats.

It started, as most problems do, with the publication of my first nonfiction piece. A good literary magazine selected “Hearts and Minds” as a runner up for their spring nonfiction prize. I was thrilled to be published, but I wanted first place; first place came with a 500-dollar cash payment.

When that magazine came out, I read the story that beat me, Kate Finegan’s “Foreign Body.” It was excellent—far from being a conventional narrative, it was more like a nonfictional poem, moving through time in images, ruminations, thematic moments.

I emailed Kate to express my enthusiasm for the piece. And to ask for her advice.

“How do you write a great piece?” I asked.

She responded: “Find & serve the beating heart of the story and revise, revise, revise. Honestly, the biggest thing for me is revision – not just editing, but often throwing a whole draft into the trash and rewriting the thing from start to finish.”

I bought a six-gallon mesh wastebasket the same day.

To most writers the idea of throwing out a whole draft is agony. A draft, whether of a poem, short story, or 300-page memoir, represents hours, maybe weeks, maybe years, of labor. Throwing a draft into the wastebasket feels like throwing time into the wastebasket. It feels like assigning yourself more work—assigning yourself the impossible task of doing it all over again.

But once my first crumpled poem hit the bottom of that wastebasket, I felt free for the first time in my life. I had never imagined that revision could be more than changing around wording, maybe cutting a sentence or two. Now, thanks to Kate Finegan and the wastebasket, all the possibilities of revision seemed to open before me.

I felt relieved of the responsibility of being a good writer. I understood, years before I ever heard Hemingway’s pronouncement on first drafts, that first drafts were sketches. They could be terrible sketches. It doesn’t matter. They’re bound for the basket.

I realized that I could cut out and change whole sections of a story. I could write a completely different beginning or ending if necessary. I did not, unfortunately, grasp what Kate Finegan meant by “the beating heart of the story.” I grasped the six-gallon mesh wastebasket.

I became a speed freak. I threw away drafts as a part of my process. I measured progress not in pages, but in gallons. And because I didn’t understand what a story’s “beating heart” might look like, I often got no closer to a good story on my second or third draft, and thus felt obligated to keep throwing them away until I got them right.

If you’re with me so far, you may be thinking that the wastebasket is a lot of nonsense. The way I used it, yes, was unproductive. But even my unproductive approach to redrafting still benefited my psychology as a writer.

Today it doesn’t matter how hard I work on a scene, a passage, or an idea. It doesn’t matter how good any of that writing may be. If I realize that my piece will be stronger without it, I cut it without hesitation. This willingness to cut good material that just doesn’t fit is something that I developed because of my habit of throwing drafts into the six-gallon mesh wastebasket.

And my ability to write quickly, without fussiness, to just get the draft down on paper, is a product too of my willingness to throw things away. I know it doesn’t have to be right the first time, and so I put things down and move on.

I’ve finished more work, not less—and published more—because of my addiction to the wastebasket. I know this all may sound unpalatable to you now, but I urge you to try it. And if you’re writing a novel, and you have a first draft that you’re even now clutching to your chest, I’m telling you, you need to be prepared to slide that thing into the mouth of the incinerator. Ask yourself this: do I want to write a draft of a novel, or do I want to write a good draft of a novel?

If you’re a first-time novelist, and you’ve completed a rough draft, you probably don’t even have the skills to recognize how flawed it is. There is a strong chance that the focus of the novel is all wrong—that the novel is full of the wrong scenes, that the wrong character is at the center, that the most interesting story is not yet being told. You might go in and try to improve scenes, language, description, but it doesn’t matter—the work itself is just wrong. As Kate Finegan might say, you probably haven’t found the beating heart of the story.

Not my novel, you’re thinking. Yes. Your novel. If it’s the first one you’ve ever written, it’s almost certainly broken. Imagine you’re learning to sew clothes. You’ve just pieced together your first suit. Are you going to put a boutonniere in that suit and wear it to prom? No. You’re going to keep it around for sentimental reasons until you design a few suits that look good. Then you’re going to hide that first double-breasted abortion away from sight forever. It was practice, just as writing your first novel is practice.

Here’s a last argument for the wastebasket. Once I worked as a laborer in the remodel of a dentist’s office. I didn’t know at the time, but my boss was a crook. The dentist had agreed to pay my boss by the week, and not upon completion of the job. My boss didn’t care if the job got done or about the quality of the completed job. He was taking that dentist for a ride.

There were three offices in the building. We would demolish the offices and rebuild the walls to make four offices. This way the dentist could see one more patient at a time, and obviously, collect a whole lot more money.

We moved the lights in each ceiling a few feet to the left or the right, cut new holes in the drywall to install them, and patched the holes we left behind. We did the same thing with outlets and the new walls we framed up. We had to move things more than once. By the end of the remodel, the ceiling was more patch than original drywall. We had patched over patches. It looked terrible. We plastered the ceiling in some places with over an inch of drywall mud.

Before we started moving stuff around in the ceiling, we should have ripped out all the old drywall. We should have put everything in its proper place, then hung new drywall around the fixtures. It took us so long to cut and patch the ceiling that what we saved in drywall, we spent in labor. The result, more important, looked like crap.

Writing a novel is not designing a suit; revising a novel is not remodeling a dentist’s office. But sometimes the process feels similar. If your revised draft is such a mess that by the end it’s patches on patches, you may have saved labor by figuring out what was wrong with the draft, making an outline, and then writing a new draft from scratch. Yes: I am arguing that you may save labor by getting yourself a good wastebasket—at least in the early days of your writing career.

Much like the addict must admit she has a problem before she can recover, the writer must acknowledge she isn’t a master craftsman before she can become one. Throwing away a draft or two is precisely such an acknowledgement.

“Embracing the wastebasket was my first development as a writer.”

But, as I already admitted, I delved too deeply into the wastebasket. I was throwing away stories that didn’t work, then rewriting slightly different versions of the story that didn’t work either, then rewriting them again. I didn’t understand how stories worked—what really made a story. I didn’t know how to recognize the beating heart.

I was building stories on events, when I should have been building them on relationships and ideas that are explored through events. I was telling external stories when I should have been revealing internal stories. Embracing the wastebasket was my first development as a writer. Understanding story was the second.

My final recommendation for you is twofold. First learn, through close reading of stories you like and through craft books, how stories work. I recommend The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler and Wired for Story by Lisa Cron—to start. But you must read widely, read closely, read stories again and again until you understand how they work as little machines.

Second, have the willingness to throw every first draft you write into the wastebasket. You don’t necessarily have to do it. Just be willing to do it. Promise yourself that anything you write, no matter how beautiful, will end up at the bottom of the basket if it doesn’t work as a compelling part of the whole. Convince yourself that just because you wrote something doesn’t mean a reader needs to read it.

Have faith—the time may come when you no longer need the wastebasket. I’m waiting for that day myself. In preparation I’ve bought myself a much larger wastebasket. Very soon, maybe after I publish my first novel, I will dump my smaller wastebasket into the larger one. Let’s hope I can survive the world beyond the mesh.