Keep Everything You Write And Never Delete Your Drafts

Is it a good idea to keep everything you write? Yes, definitely.

Words have value, even if you might not think so at the time. What you might think is a failure today could be the germ of a terrific idea tomorrow.

If you are a new, young writer, make it a habit to save and store all your writing. It’s a great way to look back and check on your progress and how your writing style has developed.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a half-finished poem, an introduction for an essay, or a failed attempt at a short story. Everything you write is worth keeping.

Why you should keep everything you write

Every writer has a file of unpublished work, often containing many more words than those published.

But just because writing is unpublished doesn’t mean it has no value.

Unfinished pieces of writing can sometimes become a source of ideas for you later.

Two verses of an incomplete poem might give you the inspiration for a short story or even a novel.

I often return to my writing archive for ideas or notes.

It saved me a lot of work recently. My publisher is producing an audiobook version of one of my earlier novels.

However, the story involves quite a few characters, as it is set in different decades and countries.

Because of this, my publisher asked for a list of characters with a brief description to assist the narrator.

Within a few minutes, I found the list and accompanying notes from over ten years ago in my writing archive. It saved me days of work.

That’s one simple example of the value of keeping everything you write.

Never hit delete – hit save

You can recycle most rubbish. It applies aptly to writing.

You might think that what you write today is garbage. But it has value, and one day, you never know.

Some writers keep their work in notebooks, files, or journals, but most today store it on a computer or online.

Storage space is of no concern to a writer. A full manuscript for a novel takes up far less space than one photo on your phone.

You don’t need to be pedantic like me. But I have all my writing in date-ordered files, with sub-folders for every project.

Yes, I keep everything and never trash a word.

Nothing you write is a waste

Every word you write counts.

Maybe not today. But when you need an idea or think you have writer’s block, your saved words can help you.

Reading some of your incomplete pieces of writing can give you a quick kickstart. You might even stumble upon a piece worth salvaging and start rewriting it again.

I recall writing a blog post about indefinite pronouns, but it was way short of my word count.

I dug around in my writing archive and found a silly little piece using only indefinite pronouns.

With a quick rewrite and a bit of tidying, it was perfect: from rubbished to published.

Keep writing, keep learning

You can realize how much progress you make as a writer by reading some of your old material.

When you read something you wrote two, three, or four years ago, you might have an oh, goodness me, moment.

Goodness, me, it’s full of passive voice.

Oh dear me, I used, in fact, six times in the first 200 words.

Oh my, why didn’t I write this in the second person?

But these are all terrific signs that you are progressing as a writer.

The best thing is that you can do something about it.

You could update and republish if you published articles on your blog or as guest articles on another site.

Even if you write a book, you can easily update your manuscript if you self-publish.

But if it’s an unpublished piece, improving it with what you have learned might turn it into something worthwhile.

Always keep your work, but never stop learning.

Revise, re-use, revisit

But never delete your drafts.

A Word or Pages document of around 30,000 words is between 130 and 300kb.

To put it into perspective, one photo on your phone is between 3 and 9MB.

A draft in a word processor is a tiny file. So keep all of them, and then you can compare your revisions.

When you want to revise a draft, make a copy, rename it, and then start work.

When you decide to rewrite a scene in a book, you lose the original scene forever if you overwrite your draft.

So, if your new scene doesn’t work as well as you planned, you can’t go back to the original version.

It’s the same with your blog.

Most platforms keep a log of your revisions.

It might look something like this.

I find these revisions invaluable because I can track back if I strike a problem.

You can quickly see the changes between versions, as in the image below.

It might be that an article suddenly tanks on Google, or I notice something is missing.

Grammar checkers can sometimes do silly things, like deleting scripts for videos in blog posts.

But with these revisions, I can quickly revert to fix any problem.

You might read advice saying that deleting blog revisions is a good idea to reduce the database size of a blog.

But unless you have 20 – 30,000 or more posts, forget it. Revisions take up very little storage space.

Like all of you writing, keep all your drafts and revisions.

Summary

Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, was nearly lost.

I did three single-spaced pages of a first draft, then crumpled them up in disgust and threw them away.

Luckily, his wife salvaged the pages from his wastebasket, and the story was saved.

All writers judge their writing harshly at times.

But that’s not a good reason to delete or trash your words. It’s not always easy to recover a lost manuscript.

Value your writing archive by making it a habit to save and keep everything you write.

Related reading: 10 Common Writing Myths You Should Ignore