One of our goals here at Today’s Author is to help all of the writers among us to do what we love to do: write. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by talking to each other and learning from each other. Our Writers Circle series is designed to do just that – provide a chance for us to discuss writing, editing and publishing questions.
This week’s topic is:
As a writer, you’ve likely started some stories and stopped–giving up due to a lack of ideas or a lack of passion for the story. Many writers never throw these false starts away, instead keeping the old notebooks buried in the bottom of a drawer or in a box in the basement. If you are one of these writers who keeps everything you’ve written, do you go back and look through those old notebooks from time to time? Have you ever re-started a story you’d abandoned long ago or mined the old notebooks for new story ideas?
Let’s discuss this in the comments and see what our community thinks.
Today's Author 
I’m terrible for this. I am terrified of throwing anything away. Of course, it’s more digital now, so now my hard drive is full of drafts, fragments, sentences, photos, sparks etc that would probably take someone a full week to organise. I suppose that will have to be me at some point.
It is important to keep it though, I think, because you might have the right idea at the wrong time, when you just don’t have time or aren’t ready to fully pursue it. Sometimes they need to percolate for a couple of years, then something will flash through your mind and boom, there’s the angle for that story you forgot all about!
Keeping old stuff is also great to see how much you’ve improved 🙂
I keep some old stuff, but I am bad about it. Most times when an idea or a piece of writing isn’t working, I just delete it and move on.
I lost a lot of the physical notebooks I use to have due to moves but since the last move eight years ago, I’ve collected old stories through the computer. They sit in a cloud waiting for me to dig into them again. I’ve brought one back out to try to rework it but my muse got bored with it again.