Delete

Throughout my life, I've been given a lot of advice on writing that I find to be less than helpful. Rules that people say I should follow that hardly pertain to the actual act of writing. Things about what words to use, or what not to say, or what not to write about. Things I heard in school, especially, like "don't use the word 'thing.'" Rules that I don't generally pay much mind, seeing as they're not exactly useful. But every once in a while I do hear a good piece of advice, and those are things that I try to remember.

One such rule was "Never delete anything." For whatever reason, that just resonated with me. Of course, it's not just that simple. It's not that you never delete, because sometimes you have a piece of writing that is complete and utter garbage. In fact, most of your writing is going to be. Editing wouldn't be effective if you never got rid of parts that don't work or don't make any sense. Rather, the rule is to never delete anything permanently. If you write something, and you don't like it, or it's not working right now, or you want to write a different story, don't just delete the words and forget about them. Take them out of the story, and put them in another file. Save them as a miscellaneous sentence or prompt.

This sounds like a weird piece of advice. You're getting rid of that something for a reason. And it's not talking about you take out a sentence to rewrite it. It's not talking about the various adjectives and adverbs you take out of a sentence. It's talking about entire sentences, paragraphs, or even entire chapters or stories that you scrap because you don't like them or they just don't fit. They don't sound right, or they lead your story in a different direction that you don't want to go down.

So why keep them?

You never know what's going to happen down the line. You don't know where your story is going to go, and you don't know what kind of stories you're going to write next. An off-hand, half-formed idea that you once scrapped could be the starting point for your next story. Something that you once looked down on as absolute shit you could realize has a diamond embedded in it just below the surface that will come out with a little bit of polishing. Or a lot.

It's kind of a strange thought, but when you put it into practice, it starts to make a lot of sense. For example, I once wrote a hilariously terrible sentence. Without going into too many details, for the following year I would regularly show this sentence to people when talking to them about my writing, asking them if they had any idea what in the hell it was supposed to mean.

Not a single person I came across had any idea.

It took that full year for me to finally remember what that sentence was supposed to mean. The thing that it was missing was a single comma. One comma that made all the difference between an entirely unintelligible sentence and, perhaps not the best sentence, but one that at least means something. Over and over and over, I thought about just erasing that sentence from existence. It wasn't entirely necessary. I could afford it. But I left it in, hoping to figure out what I had been trying to write.

It's funny how much of an enemy one key on the keyboard can be to a person who lives by those letters.