The Experiment That Wasn’t Supposed to Happen
Last spring, I decided to write a poem every day for thirty days. Not because I’m a poet—I’m decidedly not—but because I was stuck in a creative rut with my usual projects. My fiction felt stale. My essays were circling the same tired themes. I needed to shake something loose, and poetry seemed sufficiently terrifying to do the job.
The rules were simple: one poem per day, no matter how bad. No editing until the month was over. No sharing with anyone. Just me, a notebook, and whatever words showed up when I sat down each morning with coffee that was always too cold by the time I remembered it existed.
I made it eighteen days before I quit. But here’s what caught me off guard: those eighteen terrible poems taught me more about my creative process than the last two years of “successful” projects combined.
The Mess Behind the Curtain
Let me be clear about the quality of these poems. They were objectively awful. Day three produced something about my coffee maker that rhymed “brewing” with “doing” six times. Day seven was an entire sonnet about parallel parking that somehow became a meditation on mortality. Day twelve was just the word “Tuesday” repeated forty-seven times with varying punctuation.
But watching myself fail this spectacularly revealed patterns I’d never noticed before. When I got scared of a big emotion, I defaulted to describing objects in the room. When I didn’t know what I actually thought about something, I’d pile on adjectives like I could bury the uncertainty under pretty words. When the poem started getting too real, I’d suddenly pivot to humor. Not because the moment was funny, but because funny felt safer than honest.
These weren’t just poetry problems. They were my problems, showing up in miniature. Every creative avoidance strategy I’d developed over years of writing was right there in those eighteen days of terrible verse, condensed and impossible to ignore.
The Permission to Suck
Something shifted around day ten. I’d written something so aggressively bad about my neighbor’s lawn gnome that I actually laughed out loud at my own incompetence. And in that moment, I felt this weird lightness. I’d already failed so completely that there was nowhere to go but sideways.
That’s when I started taking bigger risks. Day eleven was about my father’s hands, something I’d been trying to write about for years but could never find the right angle. The poem was still terrible, but buried in those clunky lines was an image that made me cry: his fingers drumming on the steering wheel during difficult conversations, keeping time to songs only he could hear.
I’d been so afraid of writing about that badly that I’d never written about it at all. The poetry experiment gave me permission to write about it badly, which turned out to be the door I needed to write about it honestly.
The next day, I tried writing about the year I spent sleeping in my car. Another terrible poem, another buried truth I’d been circling around in my “real” writing for months without ever diving in.
When the Experiment Breaks Down
Day eighteen was about my grandmother’s death, and I couldn’t finish it. Not because it was too sad, but because halfway through, I realized I was writing it for her, not for me. I was trying to make her proud with my words, even though she was gone and even though the poem was objectively terrible and even though the whole point was supposed to be writing badly without caring what anyone thought.
That’s when I understood why I’d quit. The experiment had worked too well. It showed me how much of my creative energy went toward managing other people’s hypothetical opinions, even when no one was watching. Especially when no one was watching.
I could write terrible poems about coffee makers and lawn gnomes all day long. But the moment I touched something that mattered, all my old patterns kicked in. The audience in my head got louder. The stakes felt higher. The permission to suck evaporated.
So I stopped. Not because I was lazy or undisciplined, but because the experiment had given me what I came for: a clear view of my own creative fears in action.
What Stays After the Experiment Ends
I never finished the thirty days, and I never turned those poems into anything readable. But the images I found in those terrible verses? My father’s drumming fingers, the weight of sleeping in bucket seats, the particular shade of morning light through a windshield. Those images made it into other work. Essays that had been stuck suddenly moved forward. A short story I’d abandoned found its ending.
The experiment taught me that sometimes the goal isn’t to create something good. Sometimes the goal is to create something honest enough that you can see what you’re actually afraid of. And once you see it clearly, you can decide whether that fear is protecting something worth protecting, or just protecting you from the discomfort of growth.
I still have that notebook somewhere, full of eighteen days of creative courage disguised as creative failure. Maybe that’s what the best experiments really are: controlled failures that teach us something we couldn’t learn any other way.
What creative experiment are you avoiding because you’re afraid it won’t work? Maybe the not-working is exactly the point.