The Case for Deleting Your Drafts

12 points · October 2026 · 5 responses · 11 comments

I had four hundred and six of them. I know the number because I counted before I deleted them, which I did on a Sunday afternoon in a single sitting, and which I want to recommend to you, and which I want to recommend carefully, because I know how it sounds.

It sounds like a purge. Like the person who throws out all their possessions and writes about the freedom. I am suspicious of that person and I do not want to be them. So let me be exact about what the drafts were and why they went.

They were not works in progress. That is the first thing. A work in progress is something you are working on; it has been touched in the last month; it is going somewhere. Of the four hundred and six, perhaps ten were that. The rest were beginnings. First paragraphs. Titles with nothing under them. A note that said the thing about the ferry with no indication of what the thing was. They had been beginnings for years, some of them for a decade, and they had stopped being beginnings and become a kind of sediment — a record of every time I had nearly written something and had instead written the first sentence and stopped.

Here is what the sediment did. It made every new beginning feel like an addition to the pile. I would open the folder to start something and see four hundred and six things I had not finished, and the new thing would go in beside them, and I would know, as I typed the title, that it was probably going to stay there. The pile was a prophecy. It was accurate.

And it did a second thing, quieter and worse. It let me believe I was a writer. Look at all those drafts. Look at the range. Anyone with four hundred and six ideas is clearly a person of ideas; it is only the finishing that has been delayed. I told myself this for a decade. It was not true. A person with four hundred and six beginnings and ten finished things is not a writer with a finishing problem. They are someone who likes beginning, which is a different and smaller thing, and the drafts were how I avoided knowing it.

So I deleted them. Not archived. Not moved to a folder called old. Deleted, emptied, gone, in one sitting, without rereading them, because rereading them would have been a way of keeping them. It took about a minute. I had expected to feel something and I felt almost nothing, which was itself the information: they had not been holding anything. They had been holding the idea of holding something.

The ten I kept are on my desk. Printed. I can see them from here. They are not going anywhere either, most of them, but they are ten, and ten is a number a person can look at, and every one of them has been touched this month.

I have written more in the six weeks since than in the two years before. I do not think this is a coincidence and I do not think it is magic. I think it is that the pile was a wall, and I took it down, and now when I begin something there is nothing beside it telling me how it will end.

You do not have to delete yours. But count them. Then ask what the number is for.