Throw nothing away. Really. Honestly. Nothing.
When I first decided to try my hand at a YA, I mined my old notebooks and journals from high school, rereading old descriptive paragraphs, poems, short stories, and character sketches in order to reconnect with my teen voice.
As soon as I realized just how much the fifteen-year-old me sounded to the (by then) almost thirty-year-old me, I was off and running. Those old notebooks really gave me the fuel to write the first draft of A BLUE SO DARK. A few of the poems I wrote as a teen even made their way into the manuscript (though I tweaked them a bit to fit the goings-on of the novel).
Those old spiral-bound notebooks were really just indispensable. Really. I can’t imagine starting that first YA novel without them…
Now, though, I’m at the point that I look at my old stuff and think, There’s gold in them thar hills…And I wonder how I can manage to hang onto it all and avoid being on an episode of Hoarders…
When I first decided to try my hand at a YA, I mined my old notebooks and journals from high school, rereading old descriptive paragraphs, poems, short stories, and character sketches in order to reconnect with my teen voice.
As soon as I realized just how much the fifteen-year-old me sounded to the (by then) almost thirty-year-old me, I was off and running. Those old notebooks really gave me the fuel to write the first draft of A BLUE SO DARK. A few of the poems I wrote as a teen even made their way into the manuscript (though I tweaked them a bit to fit the goings-on of the novel).
Those old spiral-bound notebooks were really just indispensable. Really. I can’t imagine starting that first YA novel without them…
Now, though, I’m at the point that I look at my old stuff and think, There’s gold in them thar hills…And I wonder how I can manage to hang onto it all and avoid being on an episode of Hoarders…
I wish I had kept my notebooks from my teen years, and I did have many notebooks for journals, poems, and short stories. But I threw them out in my twenties thinking that they were juvenile and unnecessary.
ReplyDeleteBizarre the things we wind up wishing we kept, isn't it? One dilemma I've got to address: boxes of floppy disks (yeah, I know) from high school and early college. There's got to be a decent way to store it all, but if I PRINT it? I'll have a mountain of paper. Everybody'll have to call me Fire Hazard Holly.
ReplyDeleteAwesome piece of advice. I try to keep as much of my writing as possible.
ReplyDelete