You wrote 200 words today and they all suck. The dialogue sounds like Clippy having a chat with the Terminator. Your setting description sounds like a desperate, cash-strapped Airbnb host. Your protagonist just spent three paragraphs thinking about Pop-Tarts in a way that advances neither plot nor character development.

You’re tempted to delete it all and start over.

Don’t.

Those 200 terrible words are more valuable than the 2,000 perfect words you didn’t write.

Here’s what those bad pages are doing for you: They’re holding your place in the story. They’re marking the territory you need to come back to. They’re showing you what doesn’t work, which is just as useful as showing you what does.

More importantly, they’re proving that you can write when you don’t feel like writing, when the words won’t come easily, when your inner critic is screaming that everything you produce is garbage. Bad pages are evidence of persistence.

Every published author has written thousands of bad pages. The difference between authors who’ve finished a novel and people who just want to write one isn’t talent—it’s the willingness to let bad pages exist.

You can’t edit a blank page. But you can absolutely fix a bad sentence, develop a weak character, or restructure a scene that isn’t working.

So don’t let writing badly stop you. Write boring scenes, stilted dialogue, and descriptions that sound like instruction manuals. (If Neal Stephenson can do it, so can you). Write pages you wouldn’t show to anyone.

Then write some more.

Maybe next month, you’ll come back to these pages and they won’t be as bad as you remember. Some of them will surprise you. Some of them will contain the seeds of something good. Some of them will just need a little adjustment to become exactly what your story needs.

But first, you have to open. that. draft. and. write.