Totally Useful Tips #2

So here’s another tip for y’all.  Don’t lose your shit.  And by that I mean don’t lose what you write.  I mean, deleting stuff is fine.  You know, it’s bad, and clear it and erase it so that you may write over it and make it better.  But what I’m talking about is keeping the writing from ages past.

I’m talking about the stuff you first started with when you started writing.  I’m talking about the stuff that completely sucks.  I mean, not at first.  At first it’s good and it’s beautiful and worthy of keeping.  But give some time and get a kind of perspective that’s far away from when it was originally written.  And then you can tell that it sucks.

That is assuming that you do get better with time.

I mean, you should be getting better over time.  It makes sense to do that.  Practice makes perfect.  Or in this case, practice makes better.  The more you write and the more and you read and the more you practice the better you get.  So get better.  And then take a look back at what you’ve written.

And see what happened that was wrong.  See what happens that was right.  What can you learn from your own work?  We read other author’s work so that we can learn and understand and dissect what they write and how they do that.  So take a look at old work and see it from a different perspective.  How can you learn from your old work?  What worked and what different?

Only time can give you that perspective.

So now, if you delete what you had written or lose what you had written then how could you learn from your mistakes?  If you never take a look back, then how can you see how you’ve improved?

So keep your stuff, don’t lose your shit.  Keep what you write and take a look at it every now and then.  It’ll be good for ya, I swear.