Gary Bloomer | SHAKING THE TREE # 255
I have a folder on my computer named “The Compost Heap.”
It’s not what you might call a pretty place.
It’s a digital graveyard of half-finished essays, cringe-worthy opening lines, and ambitious ideas that went nowhere.
For years, I viewed it with a mixture of shame and regret—a monument to my creative shortcomings, of which there are many.
There are three … no … FOUR ideas for novels, plus many hundreds of articles, and even a partially complete screenplay.
I’ll bet you have a version of this folder, too. I suspect most writers do.
It might be a sketchbook filled with abandoned drawings (I’ve got lots of those too), a camera roll of unused images or footage, or a Notes app cluttered with concepts that fizzled, sputtered, and died a death (ditto on that one as well).
Our instinct is to see these semi-finished projects as little piles of poop; as failures. We label them, we tuck them away, and we try to forget the time we wasted in creating them in the first place
I’m here to tell you that this is a profound mistake.
That folder is not a graveyard of corpses; it’s a verdant garden of potential.
Those failed, stalled projects are not dead. They are gently decomposing, breaking down into the richest, most fertile soil you will ever have in which to plant your best work. I call this creative mulch.
Think about a real garden for a moment.
You don’t just plant seeds in barren, depleted dirt (well, you can, but it’s odds on that you’ll have little to show for it).
No. You feed the soil with well-rotted compost—vegetable scraps from the kitchen, yard waste such as well-rotted grass clippings, or. even better, well-weathered leaves from deciduous trees, and organic matter that’s outlived its usefulness.
Over time this organic matter rots down, transforming into a nutrient-dense humus that gives life to new, vibrant growth. The tomato doesn’t see the banana peel it’s growing from; it just thrives because of it. On another level, our creative process, although somewhat removed, is not that different.
That blog post that landed with a deafening silence last year? It taught you something about your audience’s appetite, or perhaps it clarified a thought that was still too muddy to be useful. Its perceived failure is now content nitrogen in your creative soil.
That business idea you had five years ago, the one that went nowhere? It forced you to research a market, to think about practicalities and logistics, and to confront a real-world problem that you might have been over-complicating. That idea's collapse is now valuable phosphorus.
That terrible first draft, the one that smelled so bad you had to work with the windows open in January? It served its most crucial purpose: it got the obvious, clichéd thoughts out of your system and it cleared the path for something original to emerge. It’s now much-needed potassium, strengthening your resolve.
The world loves to celebrate the finished product—the crisp article, the launched product, the acclaimed novel. It’s a clean, tidy narrative.
But this obsession with the harvest makes us forget the essential, messy, underground work of tilling and tending and improving the soil.
Again and again we want to jump straight from the seed to the fruit, neatly bypassing the crucial stages of planting, watering, and thinning out, quietly ignoring the need for decomposition, decompression, and deconstruction. And then wonder why our work feels shallow and why our growth is slow, stymied, and stunted.
The most prolific and enduring creators I know are not those who have a perfect success rate. They are the ones who have learned to compost relentlessly.
They understand that creativity is not a linear path from A to Z, but an ecological system of false starts, re-plantings. Everything is part of the cycle. Nothing is wasted.
So, in the coming weeks, I want you to do two things.
First, rename your folder. Call it “The Mulch Pile” or “The Fertile Ground.”
Change your relationship with it from a place of shame to a place of potential.
Visit it not with a sigh of regret, but with the curiosity of a gardener checking the soil.
Second, the next time you’re stuck, don’t stare at a blank page.
Go digging in your mulch pile.
Re-read an old, abandoned draft.
Look at the failed project with fresh eyes.
I’m not talking about resurrecting old, stalled projects—that’s like trying to glue a rotten apple back onto a tree. Instead, look for the one good sentence, the unique angle, the raw emotion you were trying to capture.
Extract that nutrient.
Then, take that single, valuable fragment and turn it into a seed for something entirely new, something that would never have been possible without the rich foundation of that past endeavors.
Your best work is not waiting for a bolt of inspiration from out of the blue. It’s quietly preparing to erupt from the ground you have been tending and walking over all along, with every single thing you have ever dared to create.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some decomposing to do.
As always, thanks for reading.
—Gary
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Next time on Shaking the Tree: The tyranny of the niche
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from the U.K., Gary Bloomer is a writer, branding advocate, marketing specialist, and an award-winning graphic designer.
His design work has been included in Creative Review (one of the UK’s largest design magazines). Since 2009, he has answered over 5,000 marketing and business questions in the Know-How Exchange of MarketingProfs.com, placing him among the top 3% of contributors. He lives in Wilmington, Delaware, USA.