On saving drafts—and recycling them
(This is a draft of an essay in progress.)
A friend of mine is revising a novel, and to give herself permission to try out big changes, she has saved multiple drafts in which she can pursue different ideas. “It’s like the metaverse, and each one is proceeding on in its own timeline,” she explains.
I love her simile, and I’ve used a similar technique myself. Although I’m not ambitious enough to explore different ideas simultaneously, I habitually “Save As” and start a new file for each major revision. It reassures me that, if I discover I’m headed in the wrong direction, I can always find my way back to familiar ground and start over.
Fortunately, digital files don’t take up much room. A hundred-dollar hard drive will hold more drafts of more novels than most of us can write in a lifetime. But I am old enough that I started out on paper. I left for college with a typewriter, came home with a bulky DOS PC, and for years printed every draft, because “file management” still referred to manila folders.
Many of these paper files reside in the garage of our new home, in boxes I have rarely opened as I lugged them from place to place over the past three decades.
I have saved every scrap from my creative journey. I have: the first stories I wrote as a kindergartener, the many small books I assembled in grade school, and handfuls of attempts at long-form fiction composed during high school. I have a stack of drafts of my undergraduate thesis (a novel), and notes and drafts and outlines for plays, screenplays, short stories, novels, songs, and poems composed since then. I also have clips of every single publication, from poems in my hometown newspaper (which used to print kids’ work), to the literary magazine I helped edit in my school’s gifted program, to the hundreds of articles, columns, and reviews I wrote as a freelancer.
It’s a lot of paper, and it’s why we got the heaviest-duty steel shelving from Home Depot.
In an earlier newsletter, I made the embarrassing admission that I used to date my notes and drafts because I was certain that some day, a literary archaeologist—presumably carrying a torch and wearing a pith helmet—would unseal my tomb and exhume my papers. I used to inhale writers’ biographies and assumed everyone was as fascinated with them as I was.
But that kind of scrutiny is reserved for writers who have achieved more fame, or changed the literary game, and in any case won more awards than your humble correspondent, a midlist working writer. Also, the culture is changing. Writers don’t occupy the same place in the firmament they once did, and more people prefer watching short videos to reading long novels. I simply can’t imagine a scenario in which anyone will want to compare the first and final drafts of my poorly received third novel.
And the shelves are full. So most of it has to go.
“I’ll save some for starting fires.”
I’ve made some amazing discoveries while digging through these old boxes. The play about Zorro I dictated to my dad at age five. A sendup of No One Here Gets Out Alive I wrote in high school, with myself as the Jim Morrison stand-in. It’s been fun to see and laugh at—if sad to reflect on how much creative writing I got to do in school, and how little my kids did. It’s been interesting to see how slowly I developed as a writer.
But the rusted paper clips, the brittle and broken rubber bands holding stacks of index cards together, and the delaminated brads binding the screenplays tell the story. If I, the most interested party, haven’t looked at this stuff since I first packed it away, who else ever would? It’s interesting to recall the journey my college novel took, from a 300-page “baggy monster” (quoth my adviser) to a 170-page reasonably readable narrative, but it ain’t art and I don’t want to reread it.
(Thomas Pynchon once published four early efforts under the title Slow Learner, claiming he did it so people could learn from his mistakes, but he was really just showing off. His worst stories were better than my best.)
So what to do with all these old drafts and ephemera? Recycle them, mostly. I’ll save some for starting fires.
Yes, I’ll still save finished drafts of all my longer projects—I’m not completely unsentimental. There is psychological value in seeing the accretion of years of work, published and unpublished (even if there’s not room for all of it in my garage).
Back to those electronic drafts, the ones I save just in case. The truth is that I never, ever—well, almost never—open them again. Because the new idea is almost always the better one. And if I’m working hard and moving forward, I don’t have time to go back and muck around with the earlier drafts.
But saving them is still a great psychological tool. Sometimes a safety net is what allows us to walk on that slim, shining wire into the great unknown.
Just don’t let the paper pile up for too long. Mice like old drafts, too.