The Writer's Toolkit #171 – Coping With Loss

The most frustrating thing you will most likely face as a writer is lost work. For whatever reason — you hit the wrong button, you removed the wrong cable, there was a software malfunction, something inside your computer went 'pop' and now there's a bad smell and the screen won't work — for whatever reason, you've lost your work. Whatever failsafes you usually have in place have been circumvented, and the stuff's gone, man. It may be a few hours' worth of work, it may be a day's, it may be a week's. For myself, I routinely delete a day's worth of work accidentally every five years or so. If you keep playing the game, you're going to get a bad roll every once in a while. It's nothing to be ashamed about, it happens to the best of us.

 The question is — what do you do?

1. Don't panic. You know where that leads to — tears and stress napping, that's where.

2. Check your word processor's options tab and see what its back-up system is. It may have been storing files automatically. If so, you can find the pathname to where that is.

2b. You may as well tick that little box that's next to the words 'back-up my work automatically', now that you know about it.

3. Time to get down and dirty with your computer. Run a search for all the files that your computer has created/edited during the time you were working on the file. It may be in there.  Find an undelete program and scan your drive. Here's a good free one: http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/ Talk to that guy you know who's good with computers, he may have some helpful advice.

4. SPEND NO MORE THAN 1 HOUR ON STEP 3. Seriously, I've spent over a day exhausting every minuscule iota of hope in tracking my lost work down. Longer than it took to write it in the first place. And then I've lost two days of work. If you can't find it after an hour, it's gone. You lost the battle.

5.  Fix yourself a large drink. Quadruple espresso, a soup bowl of green tea and jasmine, three fingers of Scotch — whatever it is, name your poison. Bottoms up.

6.  Put on some loud music, put your head down, and WRITE. I actually lock my door as well. Remember all that frustration and inwardly directed anger? Time to roll that out. Write down everything you remember, in whatever order you remember it, as fast as you remember it. Don't worry about getting it verbatim. Chances are, you'll write it better the second time around anyway. You'll find that it's all pretty much still there, just follow the threads.

7. Learn from your mistake. Whatever it was that created the odd circumstances that led up to your work's disappearance — fix that! Joining Dropbox is a good solution that would have helped me out today.

Now it's a few hours later and you're done, and still have about half a day to work in. Go take a small break and come back to it fresh, putting it all behind you. Congratulate yourself for handling the crisis in a capable fashion.