Day 16 - The Archive

A few days ago a co-worker put up a Facebook post linking to an article in which an author described his writing process. He included a few images of notebook pages filled with seemingly random collections of notes, explaining how he would archive away leftover ideas at the end of a project that might someday work better in another one. Reading this article got me thinking about my own archives. My writing attempts from the past several years are almost exclusively digital, from note-taking to drafting to editing and revising. If you're in my daily life and you've ever seen me take out my phone and quickly tap a few keys, it's likely I just had an idea I wanted to save before it evaporated on me. Between my desktop computer, my external hard drive, my iPad, my phone, and what I believe are now four separate portable flash drives, I have so many digital writing files spread around over so many storage devices I sometimes will surprise myself by finding something I'd forgotten.

Incidentally, whoever was responsible for putting that simple Notes app on the iPhone has my undying gratitude. Taking notes on my phone is a lot more convenient than scrounging for bits of paper for scribbling down ideas, or carrying around small pocket-sized notebooks every waking moment like I did in college. Three cheers for the 21st century!

My non-digital archive has been with me a lot longer, dating back as far as high school. It's a big cardboard box stored in my office closet that contains most of the writing I did before getting my first computer. It was a good sturdy box to begin with, but I've had to reinforce it with great amounts of duct tape to keep it from bursting apart. I'll dig through it occasionally to see if there's anything in there I can reuse, or just to take in the memories of where I once was as a writer. Just to give you some perspective, here's what the contents of that box look like when unpacked:

I had to stand on my couch to get it all in the frame. It's hard to get the perspective with the bird's-eye view, but that pile is a good six inches deep in spots.

Most of this stuff will probably never do anything but take up closet space, but I'm glad I still have it. I think it's good to sometimes reflect on the things that led us to where we are now. As I was unpacking all of this, I caught glimpses of a few things that brought back memories of hopes and dreams and frustrations. It made me wish I could send messages back to earlier versions of me from those different points in time, to pass along the news that all of the effort would eventually pay off with the opportunity I was hoping for.

So now that I've got that picture, I'm going to have to repack the archive and return it to storage. I could get all of that paper stuffed back in the box in an easy ten minutes. However, I have a feeling this project is going to wind up taking me most of the night.