Every writer has a story about the manuscript left in a taxi, or the memoir lost in a hard disk crash. Mine is a virtually complete ecommerce website where, instead of transitioning from the development site in Brazil to the live site in the US, the developers did the opposite and overwrote all my hard work with the existing site that was already there.
This is not a fun thing to discover in the wee hours and since the transition was still in progress, the first thing I did was grab as many pages as I could before they disappeared like Michael J. Fox in “Back to the Future”. Then I got lucky because it turned out they could restore most of it from a backup…. all but about 15% of the content which were the first pages I’d written at the start of the project. So, of course, those were in need of revision anyway.
In rewriting, I’ve been surprised by how much I “remember”, either because I’ve got good notes or because the content I wrote is still lodged in a recess of my brain. And this is a not atypical story. Robert Benchley had a vivid sleep experience where the details of a story were fleshed out and he scribbled furiously for hours and woke to find this note on his bedside pad: “write book”.
In my case I was seduced by a “front end tool” which allowed me to type in copy which was immediately reflected on real live web pages…how cool is that? But now I’m backing it all up to Notepad (actually not, since I use a Mac, but an equivalent) as I write. Klunky, but appropriate.