Young Writers Society

Hey guys! So I've been gone a while...and in the time I've been gone something majorly depressing has happened. I lost all 25 almost 30 thousand words of Neverland's Curse as well as everything else I had written on my other novels. It's horrible and I literally just sat in my boyfriend's arms and sobbed pitifully for over an hour after I realized it. (It was saved on TWO flash drives and they both malfunctioned and corrupted all the files.) So...my question is...has this happened to anyone else? And should I restart or just come up with another idea? I'm completely lost here guys.
Colly <3

This happened to me about a year and a half ago—I had a disc that had everything I had written from age 12 to age 16. (It was on a disc because my old laptop was malfunctioning and wouldn't recognize a flash drive.) I even tested it in the desktop to make sure that another computer would be able to read it, for when I got a new laptop, so I knew I would still have everything that I'd written in case I ever wanted to go back to it and look at the old details.

Somehow, in the five months between my old laptop dying and me getting a new one, the disc got wiped. Completely wiped. I was keeping it in a jewel case on my desk, and when I put it into my new laptop, it read it like it was a blank disc—"drag files here to insert", "0 memory used". I freaked out. I went to test it on the desktop, but it read like a blank disc there, too, and I was just sitting there trying not to cry because basically everything I wrote in those 4 years was digital.

The point of all that: I totally get where you're coming from, it's horrible, but people have different ways of coping. For me, I coped with saying "well, those ideas all sucked anyway", moving on, and revamping the ideas as they came back to me in my head; for other people, they might try to recover or rewrite the ideas that really mattered to them.

And I think that's what this comes down to. Do you really, really want to tell these stories? Because it's going to take dedication to rewrite them (probably even more so than it was to write them in the first place), and it's going to take time and patience and being able to fight the feeling of not progressing. It's not impossible, not by a long stretch of the imagination, but recovery (of any sort) is never easy, either.

No matter what you do, I wish you the best. <3

Thanks! I know I'm going to rewrite Neverland's Curse because it's the one story that I think could actually go somewhere. But the rest of them I think I'll just trash them. I wasn't working on them very hard anyways. Besides, NC is the idea that just...it gets my blood racing somehow. So I'll work on that one. Thanks!
Colly. <3

I know that feeling because I once lost a part of my novel, but then I also found/recovered some of it back. The thing is, if you love you novel you will rewrite it, and it will be only for the better. You will improve,write a better draft, and maybe even discover something else about the novel. Just keep your head up, even if this tragic accident happened-losing most of your novel. Look to the future not to the past and always keep on writing and never stop! Don't let this discourage you <3

I use a flash drive, SD card, computer hard drive and YWS to store it. If you want my advice try finding an online storage website. They are near impossible to lose data on and some are free up to a certain memory.

^Google drive. Saved on the cloud so if any of the physical hardware malfunctions, I can just log onto a different computer and there everything is, and it saves my work as I go so I don't have to remember to hit save every few hundred words. I'm in love with it.

I totes agree with @kayfortnight - Google Docs is awesome for saving, it saves automatically and you can access it on any device anytime,anywhere that you have internet! Go Google Docs!

I'm so sorry to hear about this. Losing work is always awful.

I only write on Google Drive, as it saves automatically and is available anywhere, or Scrivener, which I have set up to auto back up to Dropbox.

Good news guys! I didn't lose all of it. Half of it is still on an old flash drive! I'm so happy I'm literally crying right now.

So I know you said that you found parts of it, but I just wanna say, that while it's terrible when you lose something, sometimes you have to look at the glass half full and think of it as a way to start over.

You have a completely clean sheet that was once upon a time splattered with paint-- a beautiful picture, yes-- but now you have the unique opportunity to take your clean sheet and make a new picture. Whether this is a new picture of an old novel, or a completely new idea, it doesn't matter.
Some writers go their whole lives never starting over or taking chances with their writing.

Anyway, Gdocs. Always.

Im sorry that it happened to you , but instead of crying take it as motivation to write something even better, I know you can!