As a writer, I abandon stuff all the time, and perhaps, in the era before the computer age, cloud storage, and so on, writers just pitched their failures into a trash bin across the room or tore up anything they deemed an unreadable failure. Times have changed, though. Some of us are story hoarders who can't quite... "kill our darlings," as Stephen King affectionately puts it.
Confession time. I think I might be guilty of hoarding. Hundreds of pages, chapters, completed projects, and beyond, meaninglessly waiting to be uncovered again. Should they be? Perhaps not. Then again, maybe there's something waiting to be polished up and redone-- a magnum opus... a swan song. Though somehow I doubt it. Toying with the idea of a lingering gaze in the rearview can be a slippery slope for a writer. And that's one rabbit hole I've nearly stumbled into more than once. For better or worse.
The question remains, does the story or work stack up and age gracefully? Or does it instead feel like a dumpster fire of nonsense that should have long ago been discarded? Call me crazy if you want, I'm sure I am, but I still like to sift through the proverbial garbage from time to time, culling and vetting ideas and thinking something long and lost might just land on the smorgasbord of creative opportunity lying on the horizon.
The end result, I save every page and keep it backed up on the cloud, version after version. It's there if I want it but tucked a few folders deep and out of plain sight. I describe it as the writer's attic. Or perhaps, more appropriately, in the case of my books, the basement.
What do you think? Does the writer's attic or basement interest you? Or is it more a hindrance from channeling creativity?