Dad always told me to ‘write it down’ when I ran to him with a story idea. And because of that, I had a ton of paper throughout high school with all these story ideas written down. The next lesson was through example and never spoken: File it away.
Dad always bought extra school and office supplies and kept them in a storage room upstairs. If we ever needed a binder, a notebook, a folder, or loose paper, it was up there. It was like the Barney box of office supplies – everything you could need, at your fingertips. I’m a bit of a paper hoarder myself because of this.
Dad kept an amazing filing system. The divorce papers were filed away perfectly. The mortgage, the bills – when he passed, it was easy to find everything tucked away in folders, labelled meticulously.
I learned from dad’s example while he was still alive. Since I had so many story ideas, I had to group them by commonalities. Some were post-Earth. Some were outside our universe. Some were set in the US in the ’90s and some were set in 1600s Europe. It was a lot of fun. And because dad had such a wide array of extra office supplies, I was able to color code my manuscripts in a file box, with proper labels and hanging folders later on.
Although I’ve lost a few writing notebooks over the years, my file box of manuscripts has stayed with me generally whole (except for some paper mites that got in somehow over the years). And thanks to this file box, whenever I get back to writing I can pull out a folder, flip through the pages, find my manuscripts and my sketches and get right back to work where I left off years ago. 🙂
So there. Two lessons from dad: Write it down, and File it away.