I don't have such a file, since I don't tend to include things in a story if they don't belong there (IMO). So I don't really cut stuff out later on. (I do know at least one exception, however, a novel I shoehorned a bad subplot into a long time back. When it's rewritten that really needs to go. Thank God it's not a big one or important or anything. Similar situation with a bad subplot in another novel, but it's more entwined and I gave up work on that ages ago. Ah well.)
I
do have slews of unfinished stories and novels that are so atrociously written by now that they're poop files all their own. Sad to say they outnumber my finished, polished works.
But that's okay. Perhaps someday I'll be able to...de-poopify them?
I also used to have this bad habit of writing key scenes in upcoming stories before the stories themselves were written, then of course, by the time the story is written, the original scene is nothing like the final one and is just utterly embarrassing to read. I can think of one such scene for my last serial. I found it by mistake years after writing it and was like, "EW what is this junk??"
Now I make myself NOT write scenes out of sequence for this very reason. It's a waste of time since they're going to be all wrong by the time I get to that part of the story!
