I never throw anything away. I not only have everything I wrote in highschool, but I have everything I wrote in Jr. High as well, pretty much. I even started dumping my "first" story onto my webpage, spelling errors and all. (This would be the first story I tried to write down on paper for the sake of writing down on paper that was not a school assignment, and was not a retelling of someone else's story. I was about eleven at the time.) Although I haven't got very far with it, I rather enjoy typing it up. It's nice to see all the problems I don't have anymore. :) But I know lots and lots and lots and lots of writers that seem to do exactly what you are doing. They write, they think it stinks and they delete it. This is known in the trade as having an overactive internal editor. (I, on the other hand, have a disfunctional internal editor, opposite end of the scale problem.) There are ways of tricking your internal editor into turning itself off. Try repeating to yourself, whichever of the following mantras best fits your motivations. #1 - I am simply writing as a form of therapy. Keeping this stuff for a year so I can read it again after time has passed is part of that therapy. #2 - This is just a practise novel I am writing so that I can practise doing endings. In order to practise endings, I don't have to write a GOOD novel, I just have to GET to the END. #3 - Experts say you need to write a million words of drek before you can start writing the good stuff. This short story will be drek words 101500 to 104000. #4 - It doesn't matter if it stinks because I can always submitt it under an assumed name. If none of these fit, try making up your own. Other techniques that are supposed to help are: Typing with your screen turned off. If you can't see what your typing, you can't know that it stinks. (Really good for people who can't ever finish anything because they keep seeing all the errors they made in the stuff they just finished typing and so they go back and twiddle, and twiddle some more....) Using an outrageous font in some strange color (Megenta Uethi Gothic, Yes!), so that your editor is clued into the fact that this is "NOT to be taken SERIOUSLY" Set yourself high wordage quotas, and really, really try and achieve them. (If you still have this problem next November try joining the National Novel Writing Month challenge. dialyn usually helpfully posts a link.) The idea is to force yourself to write so fast that of course it's drek. Doesn't matter. Don't have to write good, just have to get words. Write longhand. It takes more effort to destroy hand written pages than it does to simply fail to save a wordprocessing file. People with overactive internal editors are frequently surprised at how not horrible what they wrote, assuring themselves it was horrible drek all the while, actually ended up being when they came back to it after a suitable cooling period. Personally, I need a cooling period in order to see anything wrong with my stuff. :(