It’s taken me two years to learn to use the delete key on the computer.
It’s easier to explain if I tell you about the little metal contraption my father gave me in the 70’s when I owned a Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder.
That was back when Vic and I spent hours creating custom-made music tapes, recording 12-inch plastic albums onto long-playing reels of shiny brown tape. Hours of music evolved into days of music, as our stack of reel-to-reel tapes grew taller. Alas, this is just the sort of happiness to foreshadow tragedy.
Unexpectedly, one day arriving home, hot and tired, I caught the sight of one of our precious tapes…unwound, chewed, bundled, draped, and broken…all of it covering the far end of the living room floor. Christie the puppy dog apparently loved these tapes as much as we did and had entertained herself by shaking the reel back and forth, excited to see the brown glossy tape wind out bit by bit into a tangled, slobbery heap. Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night, riddled with teeth marks, had been savagely chewed.
And this is why Dad gave me his metal contraption, a tape splicer. That night long ago, with a jumbled pile of tape on the kitchen table, I set to cutting and splicing.
The little metal splicer fit neatly in the palm of my hand. It was a tiny aluminum “table” with two hinged “doors,” side by side clicking down tightly across the table…like the magician’s box lid for sawing the lady in half. With the mess of tape in hand, I found where good tape began on each side and laid it across the track groove in the middle of the table. I closed the two lids, left and right, over the tape and snapped down a baby guillotine. I cut out long stretches of mangled Neil Diamond songs and watched them slither to the floor under my feet.
Then, raising the magician’s trap door, I applied mending tape. Voila! The tape was reconnected.
I loved the magic of the tape splicer. But Vic and I always missed the pieces of songs, especially so because, as the tape played along and hit the splice, Neil was instantly jerked from throbbing drum beats to a quiet, heart-rending ballad. The tape looked whole and new again, wrapped around the reel. But inside, there were cuts and bandages where wonderful music had been executed, and you never were able to completely forget.
This brings me back to the ‘delete’ key,–magical, but sharp as a guillotine. I can use it, but it’s not nearly as much fun as the aluminum splicer. Besides, I miss every vanquished word. Each one is a special note in my writer’s song on the page, typed in a moment of literary genius. What an act of irreverence to remove them with a delete! It’s all the more hideous when you watch how quickly someone can highlight an entire chapter with the Control+A and delete an entire day’s work.
I prefer the days when writers wadded up the paper and tossed it on the floor under the typewriter. At 
least, with the wreckage at your feet, you were aware of the long hours of labor. If your mind went blank, you could kick through the pile, pick a dead page up with your big toe, and toss it into the garbage. If you changed your mind, you could retrieve it, smooth out the page and put it back on the desk. You could iron it flat. Fondle it. It was yours. You gave birth to it, even if it was terrible.
I don’t care what my computer guru says, once you hit delete it’s gone. I know there’s an undo key, but I have yet to remember this before I hit a bunch of keys in panic and scramble Mr. Undo’s memory.
Sure. I can hire someone to come in and search through a hard disk and ‘reconstruct’ all my lost garbage. But I’ve never been really happy watching anyone renaming files and restructuring my disk, especially after one or two choice, and highly costly, “Oops.”
Delete is writer suicide. It’s just slightly better than a computer crash. In both cases you lose some highly creative verbal “stuff.” Forever. And there’s not one shred of evidence left behind to prove you would have been the next Margaret Mitchell, if not for the Delete.
Oh, I can press the delete key sure enough. It’s just that I’d rather not. 
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THE WRITER’S LIFE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Eventually…you come to A More Mature View of Delete
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