Use Carbon Paper.
Some writers never keep copies of what they write. I have learned that to my sorrow in more than one editorial experience. For instance, I will send a story to an artist by mail asking him to illustrate it. Artists, I have discovered, are a migratory set, and sometimes the manuscript fails to find the artist; he has removed to other quarters. In more than one of these cases the manuscript has never come back to me, and in two instances, on appeal to the author for a copy, the reply was given: "I never keep copies of my stories. I can write another one for you, but I cannot duplicate that one." One author, who never uses a typewriter, but puts her manuscript—which is always excellent—in the primitive long hand, wrote me, "While I should be copying a story I might be writing another; and manuscripts are very seldom lost in the mail." But sometimes they are lost, and sometimes they are burned up in railroad accidents, or in accidents of a different nature, as when a valuable manuscript was destroyed for me when something went wrong in the pneumatic tube through which the Boston mail is shot to the railway stations.
These experiences have led me to the custom of always slipping a piece of carbon paper and a second sheet of white paper back of whatever I write on the typewriter. Moreover, when I write with ink or pencil it is often with copying ink or copying pencil, and when I am done there are needed only a damp cloth, a sheet of blotting paper, and my copying press, and I am safe from loss of my labor.
The carbon-paper principle is one of very wide application. In these busy days, when so much is clamoring to be done, it is nothing less than a sin to do anything over again needlessly; and yet some people are constantly committing that sin. They are teachers in the Sunday school, and there are certain facts that they know will come up time and again—such a fact as the year when Christ died; yet every time they must hunt it up in the Bible dictionary or the quarterly. They have not used carbon paper in their lesson preparation. Once learning a fact is enough—if it is learned.
Perhaps you are a housewife sewing on a button. You do not half sew it on; the threads are loose and too few of them, and in a day off comes the button again. You did not use carbon paper in your sewing.
Perhaps you are in the habit—and a very useful habit it is—of making notes of interesting facts or helpful anecdotes as you hear them or read them; and perhaps you also have the useful habit of making clippings from periodicals; but you do not place your notes in any permanent form, carefully indexed, and you have no system of keeping your clippings, so that you can turn to one upon any subject when you want it. You have not used carbon paper, and you have lost your work.
"Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well," and doing it well implies doing it with proper permanency. It means a trifle more effort at the time, but the time it saves is beyond computation.