Save Everything

If you’re not working by hand, make sure you save all your earlier drafts and versions. You never know when you might need to add something…only to realize you wrote the perfect line in an earlier chapter you cut!

I love Scrivener’s Snapshot feature for this, or else Track Changes in Word.

And of course, since I personally and usually working on a printed manuscript, the original words are still right there! Nothing on my hard drive has actually been changed yet.

Start Over If You Have To