Never Throw Anything Away, by Elizabeth Kay
In the olden days (when I started writing) paper accumulated like snowdrifts on shelves, in corners, on table-tops and work surfaces. Those of us who went to college had no office training whatsoever, and filing was something you did to your nails. Typing up handwritten copy was time-consuming and fraught with mistakes which had to be Tippexed over, as none of us could touch-type. Everything had to be carbon copied, and manuscripts frequently got mislaid or completely lost. It’s so different now. You can save draft after draft (as long as you remember to name them correctly) and the storage capacity of a home computer or laptop exceeds any amount of shelving that Ikea can fit into a home office. You can change the name of a character throughout a book with just a few key-strokes. And you should hang on to all these drafts, as cyberspace is searchable and flicking through page after page after page to find that one paragraph is a thing of the past. So why should you turn into a virt...