Recovering What is Lost

One of the beauties of writing is that it can last forever. One of the tragedies of writing is when it is lost. There reaches a point where my greatest fear is that I will lose all of my writing in some catastrophic event.

Because of the digital age we all live in, we usually think that loss of writing comes from computer crashes. Ironically, those are the least of my concerns. I probably have my documents backed up three or four different ways. There are secondary hard drives, flash drives, online backup sites, and email that all save my documents.

What terrifies me is my notebooks. It's paper and I have no copies or redundancies or back-ups. I can lose it, spill something on it, or just wear the materials away from use. By the time I have maybe 20 pages of writing filled in, I am so scared to take it anywhere for fear of losing it. Realistically, once I've written anything I like in a notebook, the fear starts; it just gets worse with every additional page.

However, the fact of the matter is that, no matter how hard we try to avoid it, we will eventually lose some amount of writing. It could be an entire manuscript or it could be half of an essay. Regardless of what we lose, it gives us a quandry. What should I do?

I have found that there are three options available when you lose your writing. The first option is to accept it as a premature death, give a eulogy, and move on. I have met few, if any, writers who would actually do that. We're going to bring our writing back from the dead. That's where the remaining two options are.

Since you wrote the piece that has been lost, it should still be in your memory. As such, one approach is to try to reclaim exactly what you wrote in the original document. Some of those important words and phrases will surely stick in your head, and the rest of the writing either leads up to them or carries on from them. The problem is that the parts you don't remember usually stay forgotten. When you have a few bright shiny pieces you remember, you're really just trying to connect the dots.

The final approach is to rewrite what you had from scratch. No matter how well you plan things, a certain amount of writing will always be shooting from the hip. You write the words down as they come to you and you don't know what the next one will be. Since that is the most natural writing style, it is the best way to recover what was lost.

Personally, I do a combination of all three. When I lose a piece of writing, I just have to accept that the words have died. However, the spirit still lives on; it just needs a new body to inhabit. As such, I primarily use the third option of rewriting it from scratch. I accept that this will occasionally take me down alleys I hadn't traveled before, but I know that there is only so much I can change it. Part of what made the idea what it was, was the words used to form it. As such, when a particular concept or sentence still sticks in my mind because of its importance, I will use it as a beacon to guide me down the path I first traveled, even if it means I have to play connect the dots.

You will have to decide for yourself what method works best for you. If you use more than one method, you will have to figure out what ratio of the three works best. Hopefully, you will not have much occasion to practice these skills. But when it does occur, be glad that you know how to deal with it.