Why Your “Failed” Essays Are Actually Working

Rehearsal drafts are an essential part of the essay writing process

There’s an essay I’ve been trying to write for over four years. I start a new version every other month or so, write to 1,200 or 1,400 words, and then drop it into my Drafts folder and never go back. It’s very difficult to look at those many dozens of drafts and not feel despair. It’s hard to see them as anything other than wasted time and creative effort, evidence of my pursuit of something that I may never be able to actually fully realize.

In simplest terms, the essay I’m failing to write is about my brother and his struggles with addiction—the way his addiction has reshaped our family, and the way it has reshaped me. But the story keeps changing because in a narrative sense, I’m still mid-story. My brother has not yet met one of the only two endpoints that exist in addiction. There is no neat conclusion to offer, no redemptive arc to tie up with a bow. The story isn’t behaving like a personal essay, not yet moving from crisis to resolution, from wound to wisdom.

It’s a frustrating place to be because my response to anything is to write through it. I want, more than anything, to write every granular part of this, and to shape that writing into something I can share with the wider world. Then I won’t have to be alone with it anymore.

Right now, whenever I approach the material I get a shallow feeling in my gut—like a hesitancy, but I’m not the one hesitating. Rather, it’s the story that is hesitating to meet the page. There have been past times when I’ve experienced the opposite: I’ve come to the page too emblazoned, rife with a need for retribution or revenge. Then, too, the essay would retreat, refusing to be captured by anger and forced into premature meaning.

Still—how I feel right now, in this liminal space of my brother’s illness, is itself a story worth sharing regardless of narrative arc. I write it all down in my journal, and I keep coming back to the page, to the messy folder of my essay drafts, hoping that this time I’ll be able to say the thing I haven’t yet been able to put into words. This is the ever-present dance between writer and story, between readiness and resistance.

If you’re new to personal essay writing, you might think that having something important to say is enough to craft a quality piece of writing, but importance isn’t the same as readiness, and readiness isn’t the same as completion. Sometimes the most essential stories are the ones that refuse to be told too quickly.

The Myth of the Perfect Moment

A common wisdom given by writing instructors is to write about a difficult thing when we have distance from it, when we’ve gained some perspective and, in theory, know how the story ends. But what of stories without ends? Some stories are processes, ongoing conditions of being human. My brother’s illness is not a chapter in my life with neat marcations at its beginning and end. It’s more like a weather system I live under: sometimes sunny, sometimes stormy, always present.

I’m working to extract myself from the belief that I need to wait for the right moment to write about it. I used to think I needed either tragedy or triumph, recovery or death. That binary thinking has kept me holding on to a story I’m desperate to tell. It has also kept me from seeing the story as it is: the story of loving someone as they are disappearing, the story of hope becoming a kind of violence, the story of learning to live with unresolved grief.

The myth of the perfect moment suggests that stories ripen like fruit, becoming sweeter and more digestible with time, but some stories are more like wine—they develop complexity, but they also develop bite. They become harder to consume, not easier.

What the Rehearsal Drafts Teach Us

My early drafts were about my anger: at my brother, at my parents, at everything my family has lost to the ongoing saga of this illness. Those drafts weren’t the essay I want to write, but they were necessary. They are middle drafts, trying to make sense of things, sorting out patterns and meaning amidst the chaos, but ultimately built on premature conclusions.