The "destroy a day's work every nth day" method of improving one's writing - sensible?
Consider the following technique for improving one's writing:
at the end of every nth day, rip up all your work for that day and destroy it
when you replace it, try to do something better, whether in overall conception, form, content, or all of these.
I haven't tried this yet, but the idea is increasingly appealing. What are the pros and cons?
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This feels very opinion based (maybe the bulk of my time spent on scifi.se has conditioned me to cringe at opinion, not fact based responses :) - however, as a software developer, there is some precedent for this practice in what is called a "spike" - which is thought of as an experiment or proof of concept.
With a true 'spike' - you always throw away what you write because it wasn't intended to be the final product, but a learning experience. From the experience gained in the spike, you can then start over and construct the code properly and using best practices.
If we take this idea to the writing world, you could 'spike' on thought experiments, writing prompts, etc... with no pressure other than to gain experience and learn. I don't know if I would recommend a set of rules though that demanded you throw out work on actual projects though.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/21477. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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This sounds like a blunt-instrument extreme variation of "Kill your darlings."
The idea behind kill your darlings is that sometimes we as writers fall too much in love with our own voices. That perfectly-turned phrase, that exquisite image, that awesome scene, that character who's too cool for the room — we don't want to give them up.
But sometimes that perfect whatever is exactly wrong for where it is. That character needs his own book and shouldn't be sucking all the oxygen out of this one. That awesome scene is slowing down the story because it's a pointless tangent from the plot. That exquisite image isn't an accurate description of the event. That perfectly-turned phrase isn't something the character would ever say. So you have to kill them: remove them from the book. (I usually keep my dead darlings in a slush file, the better to coo over their corpses when I'm feeling unmotivated.)
Your suggested technique seems to be putting "everything you've done today" in the category of a darling, and forcing you to rewrite everything from scratch so you can work on it afresh and maybe come up with some other angle on the same problem.
Could it work? Well, maybe. Depends on a lot of variables: how much you do in a day, whether it was critical progress, whether you're stuck or in a groove. I wouldn't recommend it wholesale, but you could give it a try and see if it does anything for you.
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