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Q&A How to keep track of worthwhile snippets from discovery writing, which don't work where they were first written?

Sometimes, when I write, I find myself writing down a path that ends up not leading at all where I wanted to go with what I was writing. That's to be expected when discovery-writing. Depending on t...

1 answer  ·  posted 3y ago by Canina‭  ·  last activity 3y ago by Mark Baker‭

Question editing
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Canina‭ · 2020-08-06T20:05:33Z (over 3 years ago)
How to keep track of worthwhile snippets from discovery writing, which don't work where they were first written?
Sometimes, when I write, I find myself writing down a path that ends up not leading at all where I wanted to go with what I was writing. That's to be expected when discovery-writing.

Depending on the magnitude of the issues, that may be fixable in-place, or it might be more appropriate to simply back off somewhat, delete a chunk of text and start over from an earlier point in what you've written.

For those times when fixing in-place is more trouble than it's worth, *but* what you've written does contain at least parts that you want to keep because they turned out really well and might be worthwhile to reuse elsewhere, writing on a computer does make it easy to cut and paste the text into a different document file instead of just deleting it outright, to keep for later reuse (either in full, or just some part of it). **But how do you find it again?**

What are some good techniques to keep track of those snippets?