Craft of Writing: What to do with old works?

 Dear Reader,

As a creative person, you're bound to have a pile of old work laying about somewhere. It may be a stack of notebooks tottering precariously on the end of a table. It might be a sketchbook shoved deep into a drawer, the images never to see the light of day again. It may be a file that you occasionally add to but usually just leave languishing on the desktop of your computer. Either way, there's going to be old work somewhere around that may be haunting you. The question that comes up is what can you do with it?

Sure, you can ignore it. That pile of notebooks makes a very good counter weight for the to-be-read pile at the other end of the shelf. The sketchbook doesn't take up that much space in the drawer and makes a nice buffer to keep pens from falling completely into the abyss. And you can hide that file with a click, right? Denial doesn't change the fact that this record of your past is lurking near by.

Some people box it all up and put a note on it "Open postmortem." Others just cast it away. But, what if you opened up that old work and looked at it with fresh eyes. There's a chance that you might find a few gems among the dross that you can polish up. You can get a chuckle/cringe out of your past work and appreciate how far you have grown from when you created it. If, upon consideration, you decide that it is time for the past work to go, you can release it with a sense of completion. Your work is waiting patiently for someone to look on it and appreciate it. That someone doesn't have to be another artist, a publishing house, or your pet cat. It can be you and you can appreciate how far you've come from where you were when you made that little time capsule known as your work.