Version control for prose

Programmers keep every version of their work and can return to any moment in its history. Writers rarely do, and we lose something for it — the record of how a piece actually came to be.

Because my posts are plain text files, I keep them the same way code is kept. Each edit is a small saved step. I can look back at a paragraph from three drafts ago, or recover a line I cut and later missed.

It also means nothing is ever truly gone. A bad rewrite is not a tragedy when the old version is one command away. The history of the writing becomes part of the writing.