Sunday, October 7, 2012

On Throwing Out Old Ideas

Do you keep around partial drafts for posts or articles that you've set aside? Or do you "throw them out" by deleting them?

At my food blog Casual Kitchen, my list ideas, post fragments and partially written articles is so long that it often distracts me from the posts I do want to write. The clutter disrupts me.

There are two schools of thought here:

1) If an idea doesn't grab you, and if you don't get down to writing it and finishing it right away, it's probably not worth pursuing. Delete it and move on.

2) The opposite perspective: Keep everything. Any and every fragment of text or scrap of an idea might someday become a brilliant article under the right circumstances.

I'm firmly in school #2, despite my clutter problem. In fact, I'll probably never delete my partially fleshed-out ideas and unfinished posts. My view? Never throw away ideas--even terrible ones. You never know what it might evolve into.