One small act to Save yourself a lot of unnecessary writer’s loss suffering
What I’m going to say may seem completely like “duh!” but in our busy lives, balancing writing with everything else, the tendency to say to ourselves, “it’s okay, nothing bad will happen” to that manuscript or article in progress and have faith in technology will creep up and try to convince us it’s okay not to save work.
I learned this thankfully not the truly hard way but with a scare bad enough to kick me into the reality of saving my work.
A few years back I had that moment every writer dreads. I’d been reading through a manuscript in progress and I noticed that an entire scene was missing. I looked through what I’d printed out- no scene. I scrolled through the manuscript on the computer — no scene. OMG! I had accidentally deleted it when cutting and pasting!!
Needless to say, I freaked out. Had you been in my house, you would have seen me sobbing over my computer, searching the Help function for the way to recover lost text in a document, all to no avail. But then, I remembered that over the last couple of months, I’d sent a copy of the manuscript to my Yahoo address to store it online in case, God forbid, my computer crashed or the document got lost, any kind of bad thing like that. THANKFULLY I found a draft that contained the missing scene and was able to pull it out and insert it into the current draft I was editing. I was sooooo happy! The missing portion was about ten typed pages. Doesn’t sound like much, but as an author, I know firsthand how much work went into those ten pages.
The lesson in all this? If you’re a writer, make copies of your precious work and store them in various places at various stages of writing the book. Even if you’re not a writer per se but you’re working on a paper for school or something equally as important, it’s a really good idea to do this. That way, if you lose a piece of it or the whole thing, you’ll be able to get it back. I felt much more fortunate than Ernest Hemingway who according to the story, once lost a collection of works when his wife who was delivering his work to him, left the briefcase accidentally on a train and he never could get the pages back. They were gone. I can’t even imagine how he felt in the first hour of realizing what had happened to him. Supposedly, his loss ended up being positive, giving him an opportunity to write a whole bunch of new stuff in which he really found his voice and became the famous writer he is in literary history. But me? I’m no Hemingway by far yet I hope that I would benefit in similar fashion from such a loss. However, my hysterical reaction when I thought I’d lost that entire section might seem to hint that I’m better off being careful. And besides, I really loved the scene that had gotten accidentally deleted and am thrilled it ended up in the story. If I’d had to rewrite it, I’m not sure I could have replaced the initial passionate intensity with which I’d written it. Some things ARE irreplaceable.
Sooo, the takeaway is from this writer who has written well over a million words at this point in my career and could locate pretty much all of them at any given time, don’t forget: Make extra copies of your work and store themin a bunch of places, including printing out hard copy. I learned my lesson today!
Thanks for reading Writers Guild — A Smedian publication
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