[WILF] Taylor Swift and Graveyards

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Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. The sun might shine, or the clouds might lour: but nothing could appear to me as it had done the day before.” ― Mary Shelley

What I Learned From …

When I’m editing a writer’s work and we come across a line that doesn’t quite fit—maybe it’s a beautifully written aside, or a clever turn of phrase that’s fighting the flow—I don’t tell them to delete it. I tell them to drop it in The Scraps Graveyard.

Some people call it a Dump Doc or a Bonus Folder. I like “Graveyard Doc.” It’s where lines go when they aren’t ready to live in this piece. These are the darlings that shouldn’t be killed, just…postponed. Zombie ideas. Waiting for the right moment to claw their way back into the light and rise again.

And listening to The Tortured Poets Department last year, I realized:

Taylor Swift just released a Graveyard Doc.

That might sound dramatic, but everything about this album invites drama. The dark academia visuals. The grayscale glamour. The fatalistic lyrics. The Amazon Music commentary where she says, “It’s a very fatalistic album… ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life.’”

It’s theatrical, haunted, and unapologetically messy. It’s the sound of someone rifling through the wreckage of old drafts and abandoned selves, trying to understand what it all meant.

Critics called the Anthology version “indulgent” or “in need of editing.” But that’s what happens when a piece pulls from a dozen emotional timelines and creative iterations. This isn’t an album that wants to be polished. It wants to be true.

And it’s built from the same bones as a Graveyard Doc.

You can hear it in the songs, so many lines that echo old lyrics. Melodies that feel like callbacks. Themes that revisit earlier eras, now layered with age and ache.

Everyone wants to assign each song to a man in her recent life: Joe, Matty, Travis. But she’s not writing about them, not really. She’s writing through them. She’s telling the story of a woman who has lived a lot of lives, and finally has the pen steady enough to stitch them together.

She sings about all the men, the memories, the myths. It isn’t tidy. It isn’t linear. But it’s hers. Thumbing through her old notebooks, highlighting the parts that still sting.

Even in the poem included in the album’s physical release—titled “In Summation”—she writes:

My muses, acquired like bruises
​ My talismans and charms
​ The tick, tick, tick of love bombs
​ My veins of pitch black ink

All’s fair in love and poetry
​ Sincerely,
​ The Chairman of the Tortured Poets Department

Not one muse. Many. Not one heartbreak. Dozens. Not one clean narrative, but a manuscript made from bruises and buried lines, resurrected because she had to.

She said as much during the Eras Tour in Melbourne, calling TTPD a “lifeline,” and that making it reminded her why songwriting saves her. That’s what the Graveyard Doc is too. It’s the lifeline writers cling to when a piece feels lost.

It’s where we put the parts that don’t work…yet.
Where we let something rest until it’s time.

Because that’s what writers do. We don’t always write in straight lines. Sometimes we write in circles. Sometimes we write the same thing over and over, trying to get closer to the truth.

Sometimes we have to sit in the graveyard to remember what we buried there.

And when the time comes, we don’t just exhume those lines—we reimagine them. We bring them back in a new form. A new Era. (Capital E, obviously.)

A new voice that knows what all that agony was for.

So yes, The Tortured Poets Department might be an indulgent, rambling, genre-blurring collection of references and callbacks and heartbreaks and howls. That’s exactly what makes it brilliant.

It’s not just an album.
It’s a graveyard, turned manuscript.
And it reminds me that no good line is ever really lost. Just waiting.

What You Missed …

Our writing has the same mission we do — to help you to make your writing even better.

• If you’re the kind of writer who keeps a Graveyard Doc, or wants to learn how bringing those pieces back to life might bring you back to life as a writer, you’ll want to keep an eye out next week. The next smaller, more intimate round, of Become a Master Writer starts soon. You can join the waitlist now (and maybe snag a little discount while you’re at it.)

In Other Reading This Week …

Need more insights and inspiration for your writing and mindset?

• I don’t know if students are even learning cursive handwriting before? Handwriting lights up your brain in ways typing just doesn’t. This one from Jonathan Lambert on NPR a gentle nudge to slow down, grab a pen, and remember that writing with your hands might just help you think with more heart.
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• This satire from the brilliant Maggie Downs for McSweeney’s imagines what OG Tortured Poet Emily Dickinson would’ve been like on social media, while reminding us how absurdly modern our creative rituals have become. (Also, the line between isolation and influence? Thinner than a washi tape bookmark!)
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• Tony Stubblebine, CEO at Medium lays out their values on building a diverse, inclusive platform, which echoes what we believe as well: writing isn’t just better when more voices are included, it’s truer. A good reminder that the stories we tell (and support) shape the space we write in.
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• From Kate Bush to Panic! at the Disco, here’s (more) proof that literature is pop culture’s secret engine. A fun list for bookish types who love when words ripple across mediums, and a reminder that the stories we write might echo in places we never expect.
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• A righteous and well-earned rant from Chuck Wendig about why you have to share your writing, even when the internet is loud and weird. It’s funny, fierce, and deeply affirming. Read it when your inner critic says, “Who do you think you are?” and you need to reply, “A writer.”

Weekly Writing Tip …

A quick chance to learn from the masters.

“A grave and a poem have a lot in common, because someone is always buried in them.” - Unknown

Bygone …

Exquisite words from years gone by.

Abditory [ab-di-tor-ee] (n.) – A 17th-century gem, this word describes “a place for hiding things,” from the Latin abditorium (abdere, to put away). It rarely appears in modern usage, but its meaning lingers: a secret drawer, a concealed archive, a place where things wait in the dark. A Graveyard Doc is an abditory. Not a dumping ground, but a quiet shelter for words that still matter. Sorta synonyms: hiding place, cache, refuge, archive

This Week’s Writing Resource …

Why not use the tools at your disposal?

​One-Tab Browser Extension — If you are always accumulating scraps and sources, and use Chrome or Firefox, One-Tab is a must for collecting those draining tabs in your browser and collapsing them into lists on a dedicated “one-tab.” You can even name your collections, like little gravestones to peruse when you are looking around.

For the Upcoming Week …

Because we all need a good chuckle to start things off right!

Then curl up with your Graveyard Doc and let the good times roll!

‘Til next time ~ Elisa