Archive Your Writings!

 

Archives of the 1970s.

Dan Sinykin of Fiction, Scholarship, and Academic Twitter

"Reading these archives meant learning in a kind of skimming form. You gradually, incrementally pick up important details. Names that were completely meaningless to you at first start to take on significance. You start to build a sense of who this person is, and then suddenly you come across a document and it’s like, “Oh wow!” 

Sinykin is referring to academic archives at Columbia University. Perusing the literature there helped him think about his writing in a new way. It also gave him a sense of the shifting times. Archives are a way to capture snapshots of history and culture.

Today we are able to retrieve information from online sources as well as print material. The way in which the internet works makes archives necessary if one wishes to retrieve specific information. The archive is especially useful if you are doing cutting-edge research because it will be years before the algorithm resets to include new sources of information.

It is important to archive your writing so that:

• You can find material to use again.
• Others can find material they want to read or re-read.
• To make it easier to find material that probably is not available elsewhere on the internet.
• To preserve a record of your writing and your growth as a writer.
• As a backup to the Cloud.

All my writings are archived in indices. Check out how to do this here.

Start today. Every time you publish something, put it in your archive and update the INDEX.

Happy writing! Happy archiving!

Alice C. Linsley

Related reading: Archive of New York Times Writers on Writing; Failure to Preserve Science Journals; Reflections on the Writing Life: INDEX of Topics