I'm doing a massive deep-clean of my room today, and I keep finding scraps and pieces of old manuscripts lying around in drawers, closets, folders. They're everywhere: ideas scrawled in notebooks, character and plot notes on loose-leaf paper, whole drafts of edited manuscripts in stacks or three-ring binders.
And I have NO IDEA what to do with them. Part of me wants to be nostalgic and keep them, because maybe someday I'll have fun reading through the old stuff, the unpublished stuff, the really bad stuff that no one else ever saw.But the other part of me wants to chuck it all in the recycle bin -- because honestly, if I kept every print-out or notecard of every draft I ever wrote, I wouldn't have room for a bed in my room.
What do you do with old manuscript copies and writing notes? Should I be nostalgic or realistic? Help!!
Convert them to digital. I'd keep them in a file of your writing and chuck the physical ones.
ReplyDeleteKeep them! Just set aside space in your bookshelf for them--you never know when you may be inspired again. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I should be passing out advice since I'm a packrat and tend to keep everything. But I'd keep the pieces you like the most, ones most representative of your writing journey, and throw out the rest.
ReplyDeleteI'd keep anything that you can glance at and say, "huh, there's still something in there that interests me." Because those are the gems you might find in three years when you're stuck and inspire you to write again.
ReplyDeleteI used to save my stuff for about 5 years, as this general rule, unless it was utter crap and I hated it. And I've been really amazed how many times I read through something awful and discover that although it sucked, it captured something, or had one amazing character who I simply didn't portray right, and now I want to try again.
My thoughts. Good luck! Sorting through it all can be fun.
-Mandy
I threw out most of my super early writing in a cleaning fit a while ago. And I really regret it, now. So I recommend keeping everything. Even if you have to scan and create digital copies to free up space (b/c omg, I know, there are just so many odd scraps of paper. It's like a paper deluge).
ReplyDelete