Once written, thrice lost

I have often been told I am not precious with my writing. There are reasons for that.

Now, do understand, when I say “not precious with my writing” I don’t mean I’m careless with craft. I will angst over finding the right word, having taken Twain’s quote (“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”) to heart when I was younger.

Rather I am not precious when it comes to editing, to what it takes to get things into shape. I don’t mourn lost phrases or even sub-plots. I shrug and get out my knives and go to work, cutting away what needs to get gone.

Like I mentioned – there’s a reason for that.

I’ve lost, to date, all of my writing three and a half times. Just gone, all records of it, and yes I’ll explain the half. But once you lose it all, you learn that there will always be other words, other stories, and other chances. So things like being precious about edits, being too close to this stuff, falls away easily.

So how did I lose all my writing that often?

When I was a kid I wrote a bunch. There weren’t home computers in general, so I learned to write on typewriters. And that meant I just had my copy, maybe two if I’d used carbon paper. I kept it all in a folder or three. Just bunches of stories, and little things here and there, the way kids do when they’re learning to tell stories.

And then one day it got thrown out. I don’t know who in my family did it. I don’t think it was done with malice, but rather honest mistake during sorting and cleaning stuff. Just grabbing a stack of stuff to go from Place A and grabbing those folders with it and no one noticed until it was too late.

It happens and it’s terrible, and there’s just nothing for it.

When I went to High School, I got a Brother Word Processor. This thing was a step up from a typewriter in that you had a tiny screen that held like 4 or 6 lines of text and you could save your file to a disc. You could also, of course, use it as a direct typewriter, but the power lay in writing out a longer document over time then hitting “print” which would auto-type it out page by page as you fed paper to it.

I wrote a lot of things on that device. I didn’t tend to save hard copy, because why would I? I had these discs!

Anyway, so yeah, I went to college and got my first actual laptop. It didn’t read the Brother format but that was fine I had the discs and could print that stuff out if I needed to when I was home.

Except that the Brother thing stopped working, and they didn’t make them anymore, and the discs sat and eventually got lost and well there was all my writing from my High School years gone to time.

In college I used a PowerBook, the last model Apple made with a black and white screen, I think. Anyway it was glorious. And it had file formats that could be read by other computers. And I backed up my files to disc anyway.

So when the machine died, and the drive got corrupted, I had the discs. Until they got lost in a move. Because of course they did, this is my luck.

Now since then I have been ever more careful. So where, you might ask, does that half come in?

I spent a decade, probably, writing columns on the internet for various sites. At the lowest it was a column a week. Most years it was two to three across various sites. I treated it as disposable and didn’t keep records of it, and maybe I should have.

The thing is you need to get that by then I just assumed writing was disposable. And the columns were, between reviews for places like Publisher’s Weekly, or columns for any of the number of places I worked or review sites, or whatever they were at the time – I didn’t deeply care about them.

I mean I cared that I didn’t good work but I didn’t want to hang on to them. I wasn’t going to make it a career, and I didn’t think I would ever want to look back and re-read that one column I wrote in mid-April 2003.

You know what? I’m right. I never have.

Once I started writing fiction for money though, I made sure to keep files. Sometimes I can resell stories, after all, or things go back into print, there’s extra incentive.

There’s also the thing I wish I had my older writing for: Mining ideas for better stories. I have fragments saved for over a decade now that sometimes I go back and grab half an idea from even now.

Hopefully it won’t happen again, but losing everything so often has taught me that there will always be more words, and that’s worth a lot, in and of itself.