I realized today that I have over 50 draft blog posts languishing in my account here, 99% of which I will probably never finish. They range from random beginnings of thought (blogging in an instagram world, for example, a response to something I loved that Shawn wrote back in the day), to trip reports I never actually finished (like my birthday trip in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks this summer), to random, half-finished observations of life, so many things.
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(car-free kayak adventures never written about…)
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I’m not sure why I keep them, especially the ones that are so old that they just don’t make sense to finish anymore, like when I started writing about Long Beach Peninsula by bike (an adventure that James and I took in 2019), or a ride up Larch Mountain nine years ago in 2014. That kind of thing.
So, no real point here, just an homage to old drafts, those scraps of ideas that for whatever reason never fully fledged. How much of life is made up of this, anyway, half-formed thoughts that never get voiced, or voiced only incompletely, contributing to the whole in ways that no one else ever knows? :)
I used to have some drafts from a long time ago, but I culled most of them as I got tired of looking at things I was never going to finish writing. I tend not to draft much beyond what I can reasonably write. Instead, I write in my notebook a list of upcoming blog topics. Each week I’ll go back to the old list, check off what I have wrote and then copy to a new list what’s left. Eventually if I keep on copying the same topic again and again, I drop it, as I know that I’m just not interested enough to flesh it out. Or, I’ll try to save a few things for more long-form writing like in a zine or something.
Ha, you are a much more reasonable drafter than I am;) Though I guess in some sense my drafts folder is like your notebook list, except that since once I start something it already exists in my drafts, I never actually go back and delete it the way I might if I had to reevaluate every week whether or not I were actually going to write it to completion. Anyway, I like everyone’s different processes here:)
In response to this I published a years old draft on my blog!
Aw, yay! Bring the unearthed thoughts to life! :) (though we’ll see if I take my own enthusiasm/advice about this, since rather than publishing an old draft I just wrote a new meta-draft about old drafts… heh.)