numbers

I’m in the middle of revisions for a book project, this one quite close to my heart (who am I kidding? all my book projects have been close to my heart!). The difference is that this on’es a lot more speculative than anything I’ve previously written.

This morning, I made a few changes and then retitled my file: now it’s version 33.

And that got me thinking about drafts. What counts as “a draft”? How many changes are required before it becomes a new draft? My general principle, and one that I recommend to students, is to re-save a document under a new name every time you open it. That way, you can be sure you won’t lose anything along the way.

That’s definitely what I do in the later stages of a big project, when it’s cumbersome and often loaded with footnotes and page breaks. Big documents have a tendency to, well, get cranky, and the last thing I need is a corrupted file, all my latest – precious! – changes lost. Saving with a new title every day means that if one version goes, at least there will be another 56345 or more before it to pull from.

Late into final, final revisions - post review and almost ready to send to the printer - of my second book, Telling the Flesh: Life Writing, Citizenship and the Body in the Letters to Samuel Auguste Tissot (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2015). Seven separate drafts in four days!

I tend to do this, too, in the early stages because I have so many ideas bouncing around in my head. While I’ll often work by hand in the very earliest stages, I also often move between paper and machine, markers and keyboard, and there’s a lot of zinging and pinging going on. I usually end up with 100+ documents with silly names (some of which consist only of a single question) along with a collection of colourful notebooks. I’m saving everything, and I’m saving all the time, because there’s so much going on.

(Also, I’m not the only person who has cursed myself for saving on top of things that I wish I’d kept….)

random early snippets, some of which eventually found their way - heavily revised - into my memoir, What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home (WLU Press, 2019)

But right now I’m in the middle of a project, and I’m not saving under a new title every I open a file. What gives?

For me there are two middle stages: the middle when it’s got a shape, but that shape is still shifting, and then a slightly later stage, when the shape is sold, but the fit needs adjusting.

And maybe there’s a third stage between those two, where I’m adjusting a fit even while still shape shifting … a little. I think that’s the stage I’m in right (write?) now.

I’m not saving under a new title every time I open the document. But I’m also not always waiting for big changes. This morning, I renamed the document after changing two words. But that was the first new document name in about a week, and I’ve popped into the document every day, at least for a short while.

I spent a lot of time thinking and writing about mud for a while, and honestly, mud is a great place to hang out. I never wrote a whole book, but I’ve written an essay and a few papers. And even for short pieces, less than 3000 words long, the file names proliferate. (don’t ask me why there’s a boarding pass in that folder because I don’t know). All of this writing eventually turned into a short, 2000-word micro-essay that appareed in my 2018 book, co-authored with two students, Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water’s Edge: Unsettled Islands (Palgrave Pivot).

As I think this through, a couple of things come to mind. First and foremost, I think I like to re-save whenever a change I make seems to alter things conceptually, and here even a single word can make a difference to the direction of a manuscript. I will also rename a file when I’ve moved a chunk of text. It seems important to record this, so that I can trace it back, should I need to. I will change a name if I change the formatting of a particular section; again, it seems important to track how my text looks on a page, how it shapes itself. In contrast, I tend to keep a document name if I’m just making teeny, tiny word changes that beautify but do not fundamentally change the meaning of things. I’ll keep a name if I’m running in and out, with only fifteen minutes to spare.

And I’ll also keep a document name when I quite simply forget to change it (see cursing myself, above).

My current project started out in powerpoint (!) because I was playing with form and space and visual elements and that’s much easier in powerpoint. There are 22 drafts there. Then I moved to word, and most recently, I’ve moved to single spacing, which allows me to read and see differently.

As you can see, I’m at version 33 this morning (that’s version 33 of the full manuscript and doesn’t count the many documents and notebooks of noodling that preceded it). I’m feeling like I’m actually quite close, but I also know that means I’m moving into my daily renaming phase.

Any bets about what number I’ll be at when I’m finally read to hit submit?

 (c) Sonja Boon, 2025