I’ve been meaning to scan my longhand writing for quite some time. For one reason or another, however, I’ve barely gotten around to it. The Great Trilogy Revision Project took up a hell of a lot of my time, enough where I couldn’t squeeze any of that in. Now that my work volume isn’t nearly as large as it once was, I believe I should be able to squeeze a little bit in now and again.
I used to be a pack rat with my writing, to the point where I had multiple copies of the same printed documents. I also had a lot of spiral notebooks that only contained maybe a few dozen pages’ worth of work. One of my first projects when we moved out here to San Francisco in late 2005 — mainly to keep myself busy while I waited for job openings — was to go through these countless printouts and shred what wasn’t needed. I had two large storage tubs, a few milk crates and two wooden boxes full of stuff when I started. As of today, I have everything in manila folders on two shelves of the bookshelf next to my desk, plus a few straggler folders elsewhere.
Over the years I’ve been meaning to create pdfs or something similar so I at least have a digital image of my work. The most obvious reasons are the security and the ease of access: I save all my writing-related things on a cloud already, so this would put everything in one place for reference, and so I wouldn’t have to worry about losing it. And if the apartment went up in smoke, the only thing I’d have to grab is my external drives where my music collection is!
I’ve attempted it a few times in the past, of course. The only failure those times was due to a low-end scanning device that took one look at the amount I wanted to scan, LOL’d at me, and decided not to work anymore. I now have a much higher-grade printer/scanner/copier — not to mention a lot more time to work with — so I have no excuse to put it off any longer.
So is any of this writing worth the work? On a personal note, sure. I have mostly fond memories of writing most of this stuff, even if I did end up trunking a high percentage of it. It’s part of what made me the writer I am now. You can definitely see the evolution of my writing style, the themes I often revisit, the imagery I like to use to tell my stories. My own writing also shows where my mind and emotions were at the time, and my attempts to make sense of them. I’ve even come back to a few of these trunked works to steal a scene or two for one of my successful books and stories.
Is any of it worth saving on a ‘donate my papers to a public/college library’ level? Maybe not, but it’s worth saving for my own reasons. It’s not just my stories, it’s the story of me as well.
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