To Shred Or Not To Shred by Karen King
I am by nature a hoarder, only
the fact that I’ve moved house quite a few times in my life and was once two
days away from moving to Spain has made me have a clear out. And now I'm moving again so once again am making decisions about what I keep and what I take.
Like all authors, I keep manuscripts of published work. I also have some work that has never seen the world of print and probably never will. Some of it I have shredded during various moves - a lot of stuff got destroyed before the almost-move to Spain - others I have hung onto because I’ve liked the idea or plot and want to tweak it when I have time. There is one manuscript I will always hang onto and that is the first children’s book I ever wrote which never got published and deservedly so but will always have a place in my heart. Much of our early work is part of the learning process and it’s good to read old manuscripts and realise how far you’ve come. The world of children’s fiction has moved on though and manuscripts that would have been snapped up ten years ago struggle to find a home now. So should I shred them all? Let go of the past and move onto new work?
Like all authors, I keep manuscripts of published work. I also have some work that has never seen the world of print and probably never will. Some of it I have shredded during various moves - a lot of stuff got destroyed before the almost-move to Spain - others I have hung onto because I’ve liked the idea or plot and want to tweak it when I have time. There is one manuscript I will always hang onto and that is the first children’s book I ever wrote which never got published and deservedly so but will always have a place in my heart. Much of our early work is part of the learning process and it’s good to read old manuscripts and realise how far you’ve come. The world of children’s fiction has moved on though and manuscripts that would have been snapped up ten years ago struggle to find a home now. So should I shred them all? Let go of the past and move onto new work?
And what about all those copies of children’s magazines I wrote for, filed in scruffy binders and taking up the bottom two shelves of my bookcase? Jackie, Patches, Thomas the Tank Engine, Popples, Fireman Sam, Sindy, Barbie, The Jellikins – many titles now long gone. Common sense tells me I should cast them into the incinerator but the magpie instinct in me wants to hold onto them to show my grandchildren because children’s magazines now aren’t how they used to be.
How about you? Do you hang onto every story or poem you’ve ever written or do you have a regular cull and shred them?
Comments
And I'm really sorry I parted company during one house move with the huge pile of old PONY Magazines dating back to the sixties which someone had kindly donated to me.
in principle, i'd say save nothing, chuck everything. in practise, i've got notebooks and mss that are yellow with age.
probably the only one i'm really glad to have is the ms of my first published short story, about ocean going tugs. very derivative, very romantic, and a memorial to the first twenty quid i ever earned from fiction!
books are not dissimilar. we don't burn books on principle (that hitler's got a lot to answer for) but i could probably house twenty homeless people if i could bear to part with some old rubbish i've filled spare spaces with over the years. i suspect that people who write are people who hoard. god knows what saint peter makes of us when we turn up at the pearly gates in pantechnicons.
incidentally, one of the books i made notes and versions and playscripts of from a very early age was treasure island. as people have asked, my reimagining of the scotsman's masterpiece is out on kindle now at a massive 99p. http://amzn.to/wYlt7I
I'm a minimalist at heart, though - well, in theory.
Ruby Badcoe