Mini-muse 007: Make Junk
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Hi little coven.
Here are the first words I read about creativity in 2025: “It is the writer’s job, if he cannot write a masterpiece, at least to avoid writing junk.”
The quote, attributed to famed literary editor Robert Giroux, comes from a 2000 article in The Paris Review and was reshared by the publication on Instagram on the 1st of January this year, implying the subtext: “this year, don’t write junk.”
Giroux worked with Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemmingway, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop and a host of other 20th-century literary darlings. There’s no question he had an eye for masterpieces.
And yet, I found myself firing off a comment to the post, hellbent on sparking an argument with Giroux’s ghost:
Ok but! Sometimes the masterpiece is hiding in the junk, no? I feel the writer’s job is to be brave enough to write the junk, then be even braver to dive back in and rescue the gems in there.
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The truth is the dead editor’s words rankled me on a personal level. Hours before reading them, while walking home to the sound of midnight fireworks, I’d told my partner my creative ambition: “This year, I’m going to write a bad novel.”
It wasn’t a joke.
For me, purposely pursuing “junk” is something of a Trojan horse.
I’ve found, many times in my life, that the effort to “avoid writing junk” becomes a barrier to writing at all.
When I dare myself to write badly, I free myself to write — the first and crucial step to writing well.
Much of my second book, Tarot for Creativity, came to life in Gmail drafts, subject line: The Shittiest Version of This Chapter. I brought my book to life by sending myself junk mail.
Encouraging myself to do my worst helped. It forced me to prioritise the process over the product. In writing badly, I wrote for myself.
In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott argues for the importance of writing junk in her much-beloved chapter on “Shitty First Drafts”:
When writing a first draft, I have to remind myself constantly that I’m only shoveling sand into a box so later I can build castles.
Even Giroux’s own protogé, Ernest Hemmingway, didn’t shy away from junk, famously remarking that “the first draft of anything is shit.”1
Junk is the raw material that helps us make masterpieces, and I’m sad that Giroux didn’t see the value in wading through the muck, sitting with the shit, and allowing it to work on us, and us on it.
Want to give Giroux the finger and practice wading into the junk of your own heart and finding all that glitters on the other side? Want to stop letting your inner critic win by convincing you your creative work is junk at all?
I’m teaching a Shadow Work for Healing the Inner Critic workshop for the London Writers’ Salon on Thursday 9th January. Sign up and check out using code LWSFRIEND15 to get 15% off your ticket price!
While Giroux’s editorial influence was prolific, his legacy as a writer was less so. He published two non-fiction, analytical volumes in his lifetime, now both out of print. He began a memoir he never completed.
Not all editorial talents have authorial ambitions for themselves, but Giroux clearly did. He wrote. And yet, it seems something stood in the way of his own successful publishing career. A gross misunderstanding of a writer’s job, maybe. A stubborn insistence on avoiding junk, rather a willingness to lean into the creative curiosity that alchemises junk into treasure.
Tell me in the comments:
What do you think of Giroux’s definition of a writer’s job?
Has avoiding junk ever held you back, creatively?
What have you been musing about, lately?
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Some of the replies to my comment on the Paris Review’s post argued that what Giroux meant is that a writer’s job is not to publish junk - that OBVIOUSLY, he didn’t mean a writer couldn’t write a shitty first draft. To which I say: he’s the most celebrated editor of the 20th century, he used the word he meant to.
In any case, it’s 2025. Junk is subjective (unless the content is hate-speech in which case, don’t just avoid writing that shit, go to therapy and burn your world view down), and classing any form of artistic expression as junk rather than a valuable part of the process, or something that has to potential to mean something to someone, is missing the point.
🙌🏻 Let's write some junk! 💃🤗
I am writing some tarot spread inspired short stories for a major arcana series. You better believe those first few drafts will be junk! My brain dumps have tons of gold in it.