It is practically a universal truth of writing that no matter how good you are, or how much experience you have of writing, there will be times when all you manage to write is tosh. All writers have to go through something of a rite of passage with regards to quality of work: that moment when you realise that something you’ve spent months working on is, actually, not that good. In fact, it stinks.

But from there, we move on. We get better. Hardly anyone is an amazing writer from the very beginning. It’s a craft, a skill that takes time to learn. Not that that makes it any easier to deal with when we look back over a day’s work only to discover that it’s all nonsense, but writing that nonsense is important. It might not sound very encouraging when all you want to do is get on and write something good, but I do think that, sometimes, writing bad things can be good for you.

One big, obvious reason for this is that it means you have the ability to tell the difference between good and bad writing. This might sound like an obvious thing, but any writer worth their salt knows how easy it can be to lose perspective over their own work. Being able to step back and admit ‘actually, that’s not worked as well as I’d hoped’ is an important quality of a writer.

Plus, writing bad things now means there are fewer bad things left for you to write in the future. That terrible story about an alien invasion that you wrote when you were fifteen and, at the time, thought was completely brilliant? It might seem like time wasted, but at least you’re not going to write that story now. You’ve already done it, learned from it, and hopefully won’t make the same mistakes again.

Linked to this is the fact that writing bad prose or poetry lets us learn more about what works and what doesn’t. What seems like a great idea in theory doesn’t always work out so well in practice. This is something that can hit even the best of writers; we all learn by trial and error, and sometimes things just take a nosedive. Writing is about constantly learning, improving and revising, and those things can’t happen unless we write some proper stinkers along the way.

Also, terrible writing from early in our writing careers can also remind us of how far we’ve come. When you’re sitting there, staring at your most recent project and wondering why you ever thought putting pen to paper was a good idea, a quick glance back over an older manuscript can make you realise that actually, your current efforts aren’t that bad at all. Look how bad you used to be! You’re not like that anymore. You’re better. Your writing is better.

So, no matter how disheartening or frustrating it is to get to the end of a writing day and decide that what you’ve written is no good, it’s an important exercise and one that could, in fact, help us all out in the long run.