Peek inside the glass dome of a gum ball machine, and the first thing you notice is that the gum balls come in many colors. Some are white, some are bright red, some are yellow; others are green, blue, pink, purple and orange. Invest some quarters in the machine, sample a few colors, and you'll discover each color has its own flavor. Red may be juicy cherry or spicy cinnamon. White may be sharp peppermint or sweet spearmint. Yellow could be banana or lemon-lime. There are even more flavors than colors.
About sixteen years ago, when I first got my drivers' license, I took my little brother to the mall. One of the last things we did before we left for the night was stop at the large gum ball machine right before the exit and buy ourselves each one piece. I got a purple one, which tasted like grape. He got the orange-flavored, orange-colored one. We chewed our gum as we drove across town toward home. Then, when I no longer detected any of the grape flavor left in mine, I took it out of my mouth and started to throw it away.
"Wait!" my brother said. "What are you doing?"
"Throwing out this gum," I answered. "It doesn't have any more flavor."
He looked at me with a knowing smile and said, "You mean it doesn't have any more grape flavor. If you chew it a little longer, though, you'll get the next flavor."
"You're crazy," I said.
"No, I'm not," was his reply. "Every gum ball, no matter what color, has every other flavor inside it. You chew a peppermint gum ball long enough, eventually it'll taste like pink bubblegum, and then banana, and then spearmint, and then cinnamon, and on and on. Each one has all the flavors."
I felt sure he was trying to trick me, but I persisted with that purple piece of gum. Sure enough, as I chewed through the first bout of flavorlessness, I got a tiny taste of blue raspberry. The flavor grew stronger, until my old purple gum ball tasted exactly like a new blue one. That flavor faded eventually, but the next one came on soon enough: watermelon, my favorite. My little brother was right.
Later in life, I learned the same was true of tears. At first when something very sad happens to me, I cry from sadness. If I were take one of my tears of sadness and place it on my tongue, though, its flavor would change. After the taste of sadness dissipated, I would taste the bitter flavor of tears of anger. It too would fade in time, though, only to be replaced by tears of fear, sharp and tangy. When that flavor faded away, I would taste the dry flavor of tears of loneliness. All of these unfortunate tastes would be forgotten, though, when the tear on my tongue matured into its final flavor: tears of happiness, sweet and delicious. By the time that happened, the reason for my tears of sadness would be forgotten entirely.
Okay, maybe the two examples above aren't literally true. This much is true about your writing, though: the same words you put on paper yesterday might have a completely different flavor to you when you read them today. If you're not the kind of writer who's an obsessive saver of drafts, an infrequent user of the delete key but a frequent creator of new files, stop yourself before you discard what you've written. In this light, it may seem like bad writing or a waste or your time, but in the future you might be able to shape it into exactly what you need.
Even if you are the kind of writer who likes to save and archive every little scrap, don't forget to get your scraps out and read them every now and then. Even if you wrote something without the intention of ever having it published, you might find you now know the perfect market for it. You may find new uses for old materials. You may find a character, a storyline, or a quotation you can salvage and re-use from a work that otherwise might sit in a desk drawer indefinitely.
As an added bonus, looking over your old work will remind you how clever and diligent you've been in the past. It might even inspire you to work harder in the future. Of course you'll have moved on with your life since producing your earlier work. Even if those early drafts are evidence of your bad spelling and grammar when you started out, or if they remind you a little too much of a person from your past you'd rather forget, they may have a whole new flavor, and value, when you drag them back out into the light.
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