Save everything you make... aside from, maybe, your creations in the kitchen, which should almost always be promptly eaten and enjoyed, or discarded. But save the macaroni art from first grade, the diary you kept when you were eleven, and even that pencil sketch on lined paper in your math notebook, of what you're not entirely certain. Save them in whole, or pieces, or simply in carefully filed away photographs.
Save everything you make, and, one of these days, you'll appreciate it.
In five years time, the same hands which once crafted an unsteady sculpture of linguine might be polishing their first showcase piece. The pen which once journaled of dreams and schoolyard games might be dotting the final i's in a debut novel proposal (well, surely not the same pen, as those come and go every other week). In one, three, five years time, that rough sketch may be all you have to remember your first attempts, your failures.
Save your failures, for the sake of all that is creative.
The first story I ever wrote began with the lines, "Once upon a time, a princess ate an apple. Then, it rained." I was ten at the time. I don't have that little, half-circle-shaped notebook anymore. If I remember right, it was powder blue, and had a pastel yellow butterfly on the cover. I don't have it now because I threw it away. Rightfully so, I often tell myself, as it physically pained me to reread the literary felonies I'd committed on those pages.
Yet, some days, I think back on that small girl, nose deep in those long since decomposed pages. I look back on her, and her story, fondly, because without them, I would not have found me. The next notebook I filled, though equally abhorrent in content, sits on a shelf beside my bed, alongside subsequent pages of scribblings in varying shapes and sizes. None of the worlds I've stumbled through on paper would have been created if I hadn't started writing with that princess, who was only royalty by metaphor, and that apple, and that storm.
So, for the sake of creativity, and growth, and your own memories, save everything you make. Look back at the faded doodles, diary rants, and misshapen stick figures (somehow drawings made entirely of basic shapes and lines can still somehow come out wrong), perhaps when you're blue, or nostalgic, or grateful for all that you were, which allowed you to become all that you are. Save your failures. Save yourself.
You're worth saving, and no one can do it for you but you.
"At The Age of Six," a poem I wrote at fourteen for an English class project.
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