There are already quite a number of high-quality blog posts about writing across the Internet. Murat has written one. Paul Graham has written one. Seth Godin has written a lot about this topic.

“With so many good entries already existing, why bother writing another one that is very unlikely to overdo theirs?” you may ask. I do not deny this (and they do help me immensely in improving my writing), but my version of writing about writing, at least to me, is unique in a sense that it is related to one of the silliest mistakes I’ve ever made, which has taught me a number of lessons that still leave strong impressions to myself.

So, it was during the middle of the winter break of my second year of university study, and I was trying to update my blog (this one) which had been left untouched for months. I also wanted to apply an updated version of the theme (Hugo Stack) that I use for my blog site, but in the most burdensome way possible, which was to manually migrate all of my content files and other modified theme files to a separate copy of the updated theme source file.

Meanwhile, I was editing and updating my other more formal personal website as well. That involved a considerable amount of copy-pasting and deleting which I had to do while constantly regenerating a ready-to-deploy (production/live) version of the site files.

And it was during that moment that I made that silly mistake: I accidentally selected all of the content files of my blog site, which contained months of draft work that were not yet published, and permanently deleted them. Yes, permanently. Even if there was a Recycle Bin¹ as a safety net, and a confirmation message showing up when I attempted to remove them from it, I still managed to ignore these warning signs and ended up deleting them permanently. In Linux no less, which means that it is way more difficult to recover them. I did try to though, but could only retrieve a small portion of them.

There are two lessons I’ve learnt from this accident:

• Don’t multitask unless absolutely necessary. It creates unwanted distractions that can lead to mistakes like this.
• Always backup, backup and backup².

Another lesson that is perhaps more helpful in writing for this blog is that while it is okay to try developing as many initial ideas as possible, expect a great number of them to get scrapped. In this sense, this silly mistake is also a blessing in disguise as it forced me to recall and re-examine the ideas and drafts I’ve made before, and I ended up only keeping those that I find more interesting and more possible to develop into a complete essay. This helped me to filter out a lot of my initial ideas (even including those that have been developed into fairly substantial works in progress) which are less interesting or more difficult to expand upon, thereby saving a lot of my energy.

Also, try to look back at your past articles and not just cringe at them, but also read through them critically and see what could be improved so that you can apply the takeaways into your next piece of writing. When recalling what I’d accidentally deleted, I realised some of my old drafts were way too lengthy. The phrasings in them were confusing. They also sounded quite emotional and immature. This accident has forced me to either rewrite them from scratch or scrap the idea altogether, thereby opening up possibilities for improvement.

So these are the lessons I’ve learnt from this horror story. I hope that you’ve also learnt something useful from here.

Don’t try this at home though. It’s not fun to repeat this onosecond again.