On the value of not throwing your work away

I’m not much of a hoarder. I like to declutter, keep things organised. I binge watched Marie Kondo’s Netflix series and nodded along as she introduced her clients to the transformative power of tidying things up and throwing things out.

But over the last few months, I’ve come to realise that there is value in keeping writing: old first drafts and redrafts, half-finished ideas, notebooks and scrapbooks. My Mum recently gave me all the schoolbooks and snippets of writing she’d saved, beginning when I was younger than my daughter is now. There is something so valuable about looking at this child version of my writer self; something I could never have predicted when I was shown this same stuff in my early twenties. Back then, I cringed at the teen diaries composed in painstaking calligraphy and in a voice that is more Charlotte Bronte than lonely kid growing up in a post-industrial Northern town.

But lately, I’ve been looking back at all these old diaries and notebooks and scraps of paper and I’m so grateful to my Mum for never throwing them out. I feel newly compassionate towards this half-formed, fragile, younger me, already trying to make sense of her life by writing things down. I’ve started to realise that we just can’t know in advance what from our work will be important to us in the future.

This has started me thinking that, in an age of screens, it’s too easy to throw things away. (I had a blog that I’d kept for six years but abandoned completely in 2012, for example.)

In fact, as we write into digital space, it’s actually really hard to hold onto things. Unless we’re very disciplined about version control, we often edit until there’s no remaining trace of our messy first drafts.

I wonder if the writers of our current age will be able to gift their draft manuscripts to Harvard or Oxford in the future? Will scholars and readers be able to study the many versions of a poem or the gradual progress of a novel in manuscript, and see the visible evidence of the writer crafting the work?

And so perhaps notebooks are more important than they’ve ever been. Start them. Keep them - in a box or a cupboard. Even if you don’t revisit them for years, one day they’ll become your treasure.