These drafts that never turn into essays

It sometimes takes me many drafts to get to a published essay. The peculiar thing is that I never write several drafts about the same idea.

Throughout the week, I come up with ideas I want to share with you, dear reader. Ideas are sometimes inspired by something happening in my life as a dad or at work. But not always. Sometimes, ideas appear out of nowhere, and I can't see how they connect to anything else. It must be something they put in the water because this kind of idea often comes to me while I shower.

Unless I'm in a complex task (or in the middle of showering), I write the essay when inspiration strikes.

I don't spend any time brainstorming or writing an outline. 
I take the idea and run with it.

I often realize halfway through that an idea is too complex to be written in one go. Or that I need more original ideas about this topic to make an interesting essay.

I don't force it. I stop typing and abandon the draft.
I don't abandon it "for now." I abandon it forever.

What? How could that be?
You thought this idea had legs, you worked on it for a while...

then decide to let it go FOREVER?

It sounds dramatic.

What I mean when I say I abandon it forever is that I will never continue working on this specific essay. I won't read it ever again, either.

If the idea returns to my mind, if it harasses me for long enough, I will bring it back to my text editor. But the first thing I'll do is create a new file. It will be a new project, a new take, a new idea really. Not an iteration of the first draft.

When writers I admire open up about their writing process, they talk about revisiting and revising their drafts over and over again. They edit the crap out of their original brain dump until they get to a masterpiece.

I don't. Rewriting every sentence ad nauseam would ruin the fun. The best I can do is correct things here and there before I hit the publish button.

Having this blog allows me to justify the time I spend writing drafts that will never become essays.

Writing an idea down is like watering freshly planted seeds. After watering them with a watering can for a while, one relies on nature, rain, and time to do their magic.

And who knows? Some of these ideas might bear unexpected, good fruits.

If they don't, the time spent wrestling with an idea and practicing the craft of writing was super valuable anyway.