A Week of Tips and Tricks to Writing - #7 Never Completely Delete

Finally, my last comment on the subject of writing.

Never completely delete.

Let me explain. There are times when I'm editing that I realize the story is going in a whole different direction than I anticipated, which means there could be entire sections, chunks, paragraphs, maybe pages that I need to remove before I can continue. I used to delete, until one day I remembered a phrase I'd used in the past that I badly wanted to use again. Unfortunately, it was within the portion of text I'd thrown in the garbage. Since then, I've taken whatever portion I've removed and saved it in a separate folder I call "Orphans". Since then, on another occasion, I wanted to place my characters in a particular situation, and remembered a piece of dialog I thought would fit the occasion. Dialog that didn't make it into another book because it was part of a deleted scene. Finding it in my orphans folder saved me time and the headache of trying to come up with the exact phrasing I was needing.