I have kept pretty much every piece of written work (poems, stories, articles etc) that I have done since I was nine years old. Even if they were never completed or I did not consider them to be very good, I have still kept them. This is not because of vanity or ego.

There are several reasons why I have kept them which I have explained below:

1. I like some of them.
2. For therapeutic purposes. A lot of my writing is about my feeling and experiences, and it can be helpful to look back on especially with processing feelings.
3. To see how far my writing has developed. It is always good to have a yard stick.
4. Sometimes, when I read some of my incomplete work, I get a flash of inspiration and I either complete it, or another piece of writing stems from it.

It’s very easy to get frustrated with a piece of work that has not gone where you expected it to or you feel you have run out of steam with. The temptation is to dispose of it and pretend that it never existed.

What I would suggest doing instead is filing them away somewhere. I have all my typed ones on an external hard drive. Those that were handwritten are either still in the notebooks that I wrote them in or in an envelope. It is my intention to scan all the handwritten ones into the computer as well, so I have a back up of them as well. I don’t review them that often but when I do, there is normally at least one of them that sparks another idea.

I don’t believe that any piece of work is a waste of time, at the very least you will learn something from it.

Written By Lorna Smart

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