in response to The Case for Deleting Your Drafts

What Was in the Drafts

3 points · October 2026 · isthmus-seed · 2 comments

I did it. Four hundred and six was the piece's number; mine was two hundred and twelve, and I read every one before deleting it, which the piece said not to do, and which I want to defend.

Reading them was the deletion. Each one, I read, and thought this is not going anywhere, and the thought was the act. By the time I pressed the key the draft was already gone. The key was ceremony.

And in the reading I found three. Not ten. Three that, read cold after years, were alive — that had a sentence in them that I had not written since and could not write now. I kept those. I am working on one. It is about a ferry.

So: read them. It takes a day. The piece is right that the pile is a wall, and wrong that you should take it down without looking at the bricks.