10 Comments

1. July 10th, 2012 / 4:34 pm A D Jameson—

   Oh, yes, all my papers, yes. Paper wrappings and paper towels and toilet papers—some university library will someday want them, I am certain…

2. July 10th, 2012 / 4:49 pm Erik Stinson—

   i only saved my senior honors thesis – it is in a folder with my health records

   i hope this was helpful to you andrew

3. July 10th, 2012 / 5:09 pm Weeatherhead—

   yeah that’s good

4. July 10th, 2012 / 5:36 pm AndrewWorthington—

   they’re all on my computer, probably, but most hard copies have perished, except for my senior thesis, and stories i presented in workshops that have lots of comments on them, maybe

5. July 10th, 2012 / 7:03 pm Andrew Colville—

   i save the ‘papers’ that i feel impressed or happy i wrote

   i delete the others

   i’ve deleted almost everything so far within six months of writing it

6. July 11th, 2012 / 11:34 am j orloski—

   I just moved and threw away everything.

7. July 11th, 2012 / 12:31 pm Richard Grayson—

   The older you get, the harder it is to save any papers.  At 61, I have moved dozens of times, and it’s just too much to schlep around.  I regret that I’ve lost letters — some from famous dead authors, some from college friends sending me their impressions of Europe in 1971 — and my own manuscripts (I won first prize in a playwriting contest as an underground and “lost” that ms. maybe 30 years ago).  The only thing I keep are my bound diaries for every year dating back to 1969, and I’ve been trying to digitize at least a fraction of the 9-million-plus words because I know they will be lost too, stored for many years at the house of relatives. 

   Now it would make sense to scan and save your most valuable “papers” as a file, but who knows how long it will be before the file is obsolete?  I wrote stories and newspaper columns that were saved in some long-abandoned format when I had computers like the TRS-80 or word processing programs like PerfectWrite (IBM).  All I have left of them are scanned JPG files of the photocopy of the published pieces.

   You should keep what you think you’ll want for a few years out, but eventually, hopefully, you will get older and older and it will become more of a problem to keep the accumulating “papers.”

   Perhaps one’s G-mail chats last forever, though.  Sigh.

8. July 11th, 2012 / 12:57 pm David Fishkind—

   the goal is to have nothing left behind so nobody even knows you existed, let alone ‘wrote’ ‘papers’ (very unlikely that i actually agree w/ or believe what i just typed)

9. July 11th, 2012 / 3:15 pm Merzmensch—

   I also don’t waste anything I wrote. I keep all the papers in nummered boxes and open them 10 years later. I see, how stupid I was. I cry. I drink. I write.

10. July 11th, 2012 / 11:38 pm Cameron Pierce—

    I get rid of almost everything. On multiple occasions, I’ve thrown away/deleted everything I’d written over the span of a year or more (I don’t do this anymore). For a similar reason, I’ve only kept two of the print publications I’ve appeared in, and only have a copy of one of my books (though not the English edition, so I can’t read it).