The Best Writing Advice I Ever Got from a Punch Card Programmer

In the late 1990s, a former boss said to me, “We go forward by backing up.” This was in response to my losing a document because I did not save it. This was back in the day when Auto-Save wasn’t a possibility.

My boss’s aphorism was based on his time as a Marine Corps programmer. He served during the Vietnam years and programmed computers by using punch cards (roughly 7⅜ inches wide by 3¼ inches tall). I’ve only seen punch cards in movies or read about them in books. It sounded like a rough way to interact with technology.

Programmers typed on keypunch machines, which punched holes in the cards. The cards were stacked into a card reader that fed them into the computer to be translated and the instructions carried out.

Think of the cards like a floppy disk or CD-ROM; they were simply storage devices. The stacks of punch cards could be in the hundreds, if not larger. Getting the cards out of order or damaging a card resulted in an enormous problem.

Card punch programmers used a duplicator to reproduce the punch cards, so they had a second copy. They did this before changing the code.

I’ve remembered my boss’s aphorism and often apply it to my writing.

About a week ago, I hit a snag in my latest story (Cozy Up to Chaos). As you probably know, I aim for 1,000 words every day. While writing new words and new chapters, I dropped in references to clues, people, or events that had not happened. These were important to furthering the story, but I didn’t want to slow down. I would make a note to go back later and add those missing items, then returned to my story.

Unfortunately, I reached 35,000 words and realized, “Yipes! I’ve got a lot of fixing to do.”

So I backed up to the beginning of the story and started planting the clues, people, or events that I needed for the story to move forward. It’s been a slow process (some days only getting 400 new words), but it’s necessary. It’s also enjoyable.

Whenever I need to go back to the beginning and start over, I always think of my former boss and his advice, “We go forward by backing up.”

Have you run across a simple piece of advice that sticks with you through the years?

I’d love to hear what about it.