Save that extra info

In class, we have been talking about different ways to edit effectively. I have been writing my IPP full-time for just over a month now, and I want to share one of the most important editing tools that I utilize.

One of the first tips my journalism instructor gave me when I started CreComm was to keep everything I write. If an assignment called for 400 words, and my initial draft was 600, he said to keep those extra 200 words because one never knows when it's possible to fit them into another assignment, story, or document.

I started doing this, and continued to do so for the entire first year of school. I kept one Microsoft Word document labelled “Cut Pieces” open at all times whenever I was writing something. Every time I decided to leave a piece out, I would copy and paste the information into this file first. At the very least, that extra stuff might make a decent blog post, I would always think to myself. Now, at the end of the year, that first Cut Pieces document has over 10,000 words in it.

When I started my IPP, I created another Cut Pieces document, just in case. I have been shuffling through my stories lately, adding a thousand words to one, three thousand to another, and removing quite a few paragraphs in the process. Then, on Friday morning, I decided to read through the Cut Pieces document to see if there was anything good worth expanding on. I found a blurb that I wrote three weeks ago. It looked fairly promising, so I copied it to a blank document, and started writing...

It took seven hours, but the blurb I found turned into a draft of one of my six short stories. It is currently 13,500 words, and I’m quite happy with it.

The moral of the story is this: keep everything you write, because you never know when something that was decent in the past will become perfect in the present.

Before I end this post, here's another tip: When revising a document, make a copy and label it as the second edit of that particular piece. Keep the original as it is. That way, you will have a preserved copy of your first draft, in case you can use it later for something else, and also a second copy to make edits on.