Always a packrat writer be.
One of the reasons my new book has garnered as much attention as it has is that I managed to be writing about something that’s very much in the news today. Right now. The decluttering craze that’s got all of us following Marie Kondo’s instructions about folding our socks and only holding onto those possessions that “spark joy.”
It’s a miracle, because Marie Kondo hadn’t published her first book when I started writing CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR. And she was only 14 years old when I started writing about living with a packrat spouse.Here’s an excerpt from an essay I ever wrote back in 1998. It was never published but I saved it, from year to year, computer to computer.
This morning my 90-year-old neighbor was up on a step ladder, washing the eight windows that surround her porch. After that, she vacuumed her sidewalk, the cord snaked like an umbilicus up the steps and through the front door.
By the street, she set out tidy rows of paint cans alongside pieces of lumber and plumbing innards. Beside these, she planted a hand-lettered sign: “FREE.”
Just watching her inspires me. Suddenly I’m ready to tackle that walk-in clothes closet I haven’t been able to walk into for months.
I know my husband will be inspired as well – inspired to clean the gutters and rake the lawn so he'll be in position to grab off any of the neat stuff she throws out.
I still crack up reading it, and bits and pieces of a longer version of this essay found their way into in my new book. It’s a good example of why I tell aspiring writers SAVE EVERYTHING! And I like to add, BECAUSE TODAY’S CRAP IS TOMORROW’S COMPOST.
So here’s some of my advice to writers:
- Never (ever ever ever) throw away anything you’ve written, no matter how bad you think it smells
- Save everything (hard copy in manila folders; e-copy on your computer)
- When you upgrade your computer MOVE EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOUR FILES to the new computer
- Back up your files regularly
- Back up your works in progress DAILY. Gmail them to yourself! Save them (update the name with the day’s date so you have every day’s version) to a hard drive that’s separate from your system. Back up to the cloud. Come the apocalypse (hard drive failure, flood, fire, power outage, an attack on “the cloud”) one of those versions should survive.
What ELSE do you do to save your precious words, and any tips for storing them so it’s easy to find them again?
HALLIE EPHRON (http://hallieephron.com) is the New York Times bestselling author of Never Tell a Lie, Come and Find Me, There Was an Old Woman, Night Night, Sleep Tight, You’ll Never Know, Dear, and Careful What You Wish For. Daughter of Hollywood screenwriters and the third of four writing Ephron sisters, she is a five-time finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award, as well as for the Anthony and Edgar Awards. She writes what she calls “women’s fiction with a twist of suspense. Creepy but never icky. I try to write books with situations that seem utterly believable. Yes, this could happen to me, I want the reader to think. And shudder.”