Do you keep your old stuff?

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seun

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I read through some of my old work this morning (horrible teenage poetry and derivative short stories) and while it was tempting to keep it, I threw nearly all of it out. I'll probably regret it the next time I'm drunk and fancy laughing at myself, but it still went in the bin.

Have you kept any of your old work - even the stuff you can barely stand to read now?
 

Soccer Mom

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I have some. I still have some horrible notebooks of angsty poetry and rambling stories. I've deep-sixed a lot of things, but the notebooks...maybe I can leave instructions in my will to cremate them and scatter the ashes. It would be kinder that way. The stuff is baaaaaaaaaaaad.
 

Will Lavender

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I throw everything away. Everything. I wrote some decent stuff in college, and a couple of stories that I didn't put in my MFA thesis -- all gone.

I wrote one story that I remember feeling particuarly proud of; when I gave it to people, they loved it. Got a handwritten rejection from Esquire. Gone. Another story I wrote in college that The Georgia Review almost took. Also gone.

I'm a bit obsessive when it comes to neatness and cleaning the slate. I own almost nothing from my past.
 
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I bin all but the most recent drafts of my work. I was recently told not to bin anything, but it's my decision and my work, so...out it goes, once I've rewritten and (hopefully) improved it.

I keep all my poetry in a moleskine notebook and bin the sheets of paper on which I wrote the early drafts. With my novels, I keep one hard copy and e-copies on my laptop, desktop, pen drive and on a CD.
 

ChaosTitan

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In a fit of hormonal adolescent angst, a former friend destroyed my first attempt at writing a novel.

Everything else is stored in plastic bins under my bed. If I'm ever in a foul mood, I simply open one up, find an old piece of writing, and then laugh myself silly.

Personal improvement is good for the soul. ;)
 

Harper K

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I like to keep everything. I don't keep it accessible, though, because I'm afraid I'd take it out and read it too often -- either to torture myself or to remind myself how far I've come.

I have about 5 of my old novels at my house right now. The rest are somewhere in my parents' house. I know they still exist, and that's all I need to know. Maybe I'll go rescue them someday.

I've conquered a bit of my packrattyness, though. I finally got rid of a bunch of my college and high school notes and papers, and a bunch of my old drawings and stories from elementary school (!). I tossed the drawings and stories because I realized that if I were to die, you know, SOON, I wouldn't have wanted ANYONE to see them. They would have thought me deeply disturbed. Eeesh.
 

MidnightMuse

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I keep all the work that was good enough to share with strangers. All the rest got tossed years ago. I hate clutter. Can't stand it.
 

Bubastes

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I'm an anti-packrat. I keep only the most recent draft of my WIPs. I even toss notes and research after I've incorporated the information into my WIP. It may be counter-intuitive, but I find that too much clutter clogs my brain and keeps the words from flowing.

Teen stuff? I burned all my teen notebooks and diaries when I turned eighteen. I really don't want anyone to read my rhyming poem about teen angst and kickball.
 

Rich

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I've had stuff that bounced around for some eight years--eventually got published.

Revised, yes, but still published. I've thrown stuff out, but not much.
 

Lyra Jean

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I'm not much of a saver. I figure if I didn't bother to finish the story then it wasn't worth keeping. There are pieces I meant to save, college papers, that have disappeared.

I have my 8 pieces of poetry and my short stories all saved in in a waterproof, fireproof safe under my bed. Okay it's not there yet but it's going to be.
 

JoNightshade

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You guys are all talking like you have all your stuff hand-written in notebooks or something. Sure, I keep all my old stuff; I've been typing away on my computer since I was 12 years old... so "all my stuff" fits on one of them old 3.5 disks. Or, you know, takes up about .001% of my hard drive.

As for my teenage journals and kid stuff, I keep that too. Actually I have a habit of keeping little scraps of paper that I write down ideas on. I have a file cabinet with a folder for those.

I guess part of me thinks, "Someday when I'm incredibly famous and respected, some library is going to want to collect my papers." I imagine some grad students combing through all of my little notes, writing theses on what "D. doesn't need to find R." could possibly mean. Or examining my early drafts and over-analyzing how my brain worked through the progression of revisions.

Is that super, incredibly egotistical?
 

dpaterso

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I've got subdirectories dating back to 1987. Literally 1,000s of files, story openings, half-finished stories, chapters, outlines. They make for embarrassing fun reading now, but among the purple prose and run-on sentences there's always a seed of an interesting idea, waiting to be used again.

-Derek
 

sunna

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I keep pretty much everything. I come from a family of pack-rats.

I started saving stuff to disk around 10 y/o, though those 5 1/4 floppies are pretty fragile. So it's easy to save stuff. I have some hilarious copies of a weekly street newspaper me and my cousins wrote, with some very serious articles about dog haircuts, riding farm animals, and a heron that got trapped in a fence.

The paper stuff - journals, and anything before it was possible to own a PC that didn't take up a whole room - well, it's somewhere.

Occasionally I just like to look it over and think damn, I'm glad I outgrew that phase.
 

Siddow

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I keep everything. But again, I'm planning to be a terribly famous and prolific author, and I want to leave something for my heirs to sell after I'm gone. At auction. For millions. :D

hey, a girl needs her dreams, right?
 

aadams73

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Yup, I keep it all. And let me tell you, I've come a long way, baby!
 

narnia

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Thanks, everyone, for some really good laughs! :ROFL:

Which, by the way, is exactly why I keep my old stuff.

:Sun:
 

Shady Lane

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Ahem, some of us weren't publishing in our teens, Shady. :rolleyes:

Some of us were writing angsty odes. Blech.

:tongue

I've got stuff as old as second grade. That's the stuff that's fun to look back on.

And my middle school years produced some crap, I promise.
 
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