So, if we assume you have 20 stories with 600 words, there are 12,000 or so words in your graveyard.

I just ran the numbers (I use a writing application that allows me to do this) and as of right now, I have 230,399 words in my blog post graveyard, my “ideas” and “partial drafts.” That’s not including “first drafts,” “second drafts,” and “final drafts,” although there are only 9,693 words in all three of those categories. That also doesn’t take into account the fact that many of my recent Medium stories never even made it into those categories because I wrote, edited, and published them all at once.

So yes, I agree. Writers waste a lot of words. That’s a part of the process 🤪