Sharing your drafts within a writer’s circle, workshop, or class can be extremely helpful to the evolution of your individual writing project as well as your development as a writer. Getting into the practice of allowing others to read your writing, receiving feedback on projects, and integrating criticisms into your revision process can make for huge progress. I’ve seen writers, however, express concern that whenever a piece of writing gets shared with a group, there’s a chance that someone may be dishonest. What I mean is that there’s a consistent fear among creatives that someone may attempt to steal work.
And I get it—you struggle to finish a draft only to keep it to yourself for the realistic dread that someone out there might be ready to nab it and plagiarize. In one peer-judged writing contest, the organizer tried to alleviate this concern by coding the webpage so that text could not be highlighted (and therefore no copy function could be used). A good attempt, but there are still other possibilities left open and every participant was well aware of that fact.
It boils down to courage and trust. You need to get used to others reading your writing and a great way to do that is by participating in feedback groups (workshops, classes, peer-judged contests…). In these activities, everyone must reciprocate by sharing work and offering feedback. So everyone’s essentially in the same position.
One way to protect your work from being used outside of your knowledge is to back-up each and every stage of your writing project. The ability to outline the progression of each piece is useful in many ways. It can help you prove that it’s yours should that become necessary. This is also good general practice to safeguard against any mishaps with lost files, computer crashes, & etc.
In this blog post, I’ll share three techniques I use to back-up and document the evolution of each piece of writing. These are:
- Keep handwritten notes
- Save under new filename
- Keep (at least) one paper copy
Keep Handwritten Notes
When I’m brainstorming and working through an initial draft, I’ll often have a combination of handwritten jot notes in addition to the open document on my screen. I find it helpful to doodle, sketch, or make a set of quick jot notes to sort out setting, timeline, and character details. When I’m focused on a key scene, I’ll usually scribble a few lines of dialogue on a notepad to remind me of the tone I’m aiming for with that scene.
All of those handwritten elements come in handy as reference material while making major revisions. It also serves as a place to retrieve ideas that I may not have used in the initial draft but turn out to be necessary later on. Should I ever need to outline my creative process in writing a story, these papers are part of the puzzle that proves the work I put into it.
Save Under New Filename
Okay, I learned this one the hard way. In my early stages of taking writing courses, I worked on a scene for an assignment and deleted the closing paragraph during revisions. A few days later, it dawned on me that I could turn that one assignment into a larger piece of writing for use elsewhere. Although the paragraph that I had deleted didn’t work as a closing to the assignment itself, it would have been a perfect bridge to a new scene for a longer piece. As much as I tried, I simply couldn’t reproduce it the way I’d had it before.
So now I make sure to save under a new filename when I’m working on a piece. It serves as a way of backing-up my work in general, in addition to the ability to retrieve a deleted item. It also helps outline my creative process, as I don’t always compose a story from beginning to end. If I ever needed to detail my progress, it’s all there in the file folder.
By the way, if you’d like to try this step in backing-up your work, numbers work better than letters for organizing the files within a folder. Simply keep the same title that you gave your initial draft and add the date using the same convention each time. If you make major edits between the morning and evening of the same date, then simply add “02” at the end to denote the second revised copy from the same day.
Title_2024_02_29 (Year_Month_Day)
Title_2024_03_01
Title_2024_03_01_02 (Added “02” to denote second revision session)
…and so forth.
To keep my draft folder tidy, I’ll make a folder within it where I can drag the older versions for safe-keeping. This would be the folder to copy to an additional storage device for backup, whether that be an external drive, USB key, or other.
Keep One Paper Copy
Look, paper and ink are costly—I understand. You wouldn’t be printing a fresh copy every time you’ve made progress on your piece of writing. That’s what the filename convention, as I’ve outline above, is all about. So this method of backing-up work has more to do with my final editing and polishing process. I find it helpful to read through a printed page when I’m at the last stages of finishing my draft—I tend to catch a different set of errors that I may not notice while looking at the screen. However, once I’ve printed my work, I’ll retain at least one copy to document yet another step in my creative process. In this way, I have something tangible to refer back to should anything happen to the digital file.
When the piece of writing is complete, I’ll place all my handwritten notes and printed copies with my edits into a physical file folder. To keep track of where this item has been seen, I’ll also retain a paper copy of all the places I’ve sent this completed piece inside the folder. This serves as a backup record of submissions, responses, and so forth.
What techniques do you use to backup your work? What concerns do you have about sharing your drafts with others? Start the conversation in the comments section below. Stay tuned for my next blog post. Wanna get it in your email inbox? Subscribe to stay informed of my newest articles, story reviews, updates, and more.
Cover Image: Photo by Anete Lusina on Pexels.com
Pauline Shen 