Your experiences of...

I lost a chapter when my little brother managed to get ahold of my usb key and swing it at stuff. It was initially heart stopping to find that I had to go back to an archived version from a few weeks before. But if the general gist is in your head, you will end up writing a much more condensed version than what you had. And condensed equals better.

Accidentally deleted a chapter during a chapter shuffle. Co-writer and I were both woefully remiss--neither of had a copy of it for some reason. What did we do? We didn't even try to duplicate the chapter and just went on from there. As it turned out, under the later revisions, that chapter would have been tossed out anyway.

Use the loss of the pages as a way to try something different.

I once lost a chunk of words by accidentally saving an unmodified file over my master file. I could have cried. It was unbelievably depressing.

I just gritted my teeth and choked my way through the rewrite. Best of luck to you!

I do remember losing the first five chapters of a novel, back in the early days of computers. It seems impossible, but, after I got over the shock, I also remember remembering every single word. Of course, I have no way to prove this. And the novel remains unfinished. Actually, after the first fifty pages, I wrote the rest of my outline as a screenplay, which produced a finished story, but much more confusion. Maybe my computer was trying to tell me something.

Yeah, I've done the saving an old file on top of a master file before. I was using a pen drive between desktop and laptop when I managed to delete 6,000 words that I didn't even have in hard copy. I nearly broke my shin kicking myself that day, let me tell you.

Of course, if you can't remember it, do you think a reader will?

Take it as a blessing. Many good things have come from rewritten from memory sections. You only rewrite what was memorable the first time around.

It would be interesting to write a story or a novel this way. Write it a first time, then write it from memory. A time-consuming experiment to be sure, but one that would teach a number of lessons.

I once somehow lost/deleted/saved over a whole scene my husband had written--as a favor to me for a book that was my idea--and boy was he irritated. He rewrote it, but we both felt that the first version was better. Since then he taught me how to save material on a portable hard drive no matter how small the changes. He does it religiously and I let him know if I hadn't done it yet. We save the newest version of anything every time we write. It's brought both of us real peace of mind.

I started writing my first novel on my brother's computer (I didn't have one at the time, and don't think I got my very own until several months later, but this was also back in '98 when they were unreasonably expensive compared to nowadays). I had access to it for two weeks while housesitting for him. After managing nearly eighty or so pages, I closed the Word program, was asked "Do you want to save changes?" I clicked Yes.

For some ungodly reason, when I opened up the novel the next day, the file was empty. I didn't know computers well enough to try and recover it. So I cried, pitched a fit, and started writing it again by hand the following day (since my time housesitting was almost over).

I eventually finished the novel, and the first few chapters have changed a lot over time, but boy did I learn to never, EVER blindly say "Yes" to my computer.

-Kelly

So far I haven't lost anything I've typed into the computer (cross fingers), but what bothers me more is losing brainstorming ideas. I tend to think about my story at times when I'm not able to write anything down, like while driving or in the shower, then later when I pull out my notebook I can't recapture the feeling I had while working out the idea.