What is rough copy? A place for early ideas, ill-formed thoughts, first drafts, brain farts, word clouds, inspiration soups, aimless meandering, typos, bad punctuation, impatiently captured memories, random scribbles, copypastas, torn pages and other similar output.
Where is the idea of rough come from? Back in school when we had to turn in essay, we had a rough copy (literally, the notebook I used had rough paper and bought for paisas) where you’d have early drafts and a fair copy which had the final thing.
Why rough? Whenever I've attempted to write on a blogging platform in the past, very few ideas get "published." Most languish forever in the Drafts folder. Months later when I’d go look at a draft, it’d has two features. One, the topic felt a bit stale and I no longer would have the energy to polish it. Two, even though it wasn’t polished, there was still something to it. It's like when you flip an old notebook, and there are notes and to-dos that are no longer useful to you, but there is one stray line on one page that strikes you as insightful or worth paying attention to? Like that.
It is bit like a slipshod garden by someone who barely knows how to garden, rather than a manicured greenhouse by a botanical startup. It's a place for figuring things out, rather than share what I've already figured out.
Everything is published On this blog, I don’t wand any drafts. Everything gets published, even if there is just a title.
How would a reader know what’s rough and what’s finished?
I am wondering if I should categorise things. But I also don't want to be boxed in by someone else's format (like this complex taxonomy: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Taxonomy_of_note_types)
So for now, there are only four categories: egg, larva, pupa, butterfly (some might not even be categorised).
This didn’t work. Too much effort.
I might try something I saw over at Justin Mares’ blog: a piece of writing he has finished, is properly capitalized; while a piece of writing that is a rough is all in lowercase, with a warning posted on the top of each article.