Remember the good ol’ days of writing? When you would type and type and type on your trusty typewriter only to realize that what you were writing was complete and utter crap? You would rip the page from the typewriter, crumple it into a ball, and throw it with disgust at the already overflowing garbage pail in the corner.
Never done that? Yeah me neither.
Although, I have made the mistake of “cleaning up” my computer. You know, when you go through your files and click and drag things you’re sure you will never need to the computerized trash bin? (I’m always convinced that getting rid of a couple hundred pages of Word documents will speed up my aged laptop)
Or perhaps you are getting more organized. You haven’t looked in a particular file for a while and when you read through it you realize a lot of the information is repeated in different documents, so you delete some of them. Or you have a bunch of different revisions so you decide to get rid of all of them except the last one.
All of these are great ideas to keep organized but have you ever gone looking for the version of that thing you wrote only to find that you deleted it? And the more you can’t find it the more you remember it to be the solution to all the problems with your show? It is now the most brilliant thing you’ve ever written!
I must admit, this has happened to me more than once. BUT NO MORE!! Why? Because I made a new trash bin. In fact, I made a few of them.
I tend to write more than one show at a time (this past January I had six projects in various stages of development) so each show gets its very own trash bin.
This might seem like a pretty simple fix but I wish someone had told me about this before I had to learn the hard way. I’m positive if I had some of those brilliant ideas that I had written and thrown away I would have won my Emmy by now.
It’s pretty simple really. Every project gets its own trash bin and nothing ever, ever, gets thrown in the real trash bin.
By having a trash bin folder for each project I will never throw out a version of a script or One Sheet or “brilliant” idea again.
And now that I have this problem solved, I should probably get started on my Emmy thank you speech.