Every writer, surely, has some experience of losing a price of writing. The computer crashes or the coffee spills on the notebook, and the words are gone for ever. It’s utterly devastating, because those lost words were so precious and loved (even if you intended to rewrite them), and because you know that no matter how hard you try, you’ll never entirely rediscover the writing. A kind of magic happens when you write in earnest – the muse visits. That magic is captured in the moment only; it cannot be recreated any more than you can go back in time and read the words once more as you wrote them.

But if Hemingway was right, and the first draft of anything is rubbish (he used a more colourful term, of course!), then losing it shouldn’t matter. And yet Hemingway himself did not cope well with losing his work.

Gare de Lyon, December 1922. Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, was preparing to board a train to Switzerland, where Hemingway was waiting for her, and a suitcase full of his manuscripts. Hadley took her eye off the suitcase for a few minutes, and it was gone. Almost everything the as-yet unpublished writer Hemingway had written, gone. In a letter to his fellow writer Ezra Pound, Hemingway said:

I suppose you heard about the loss of my Juvenalia? … You, naturally, would say, ‘Good’ etc. But don’t say it to me. I ain’t yet reached that mood.

Hemingway continued to write, of course, and achieved great success for his writing. I wonder how much he continued to miss those early works. I wonder whether Ezra would have been right to say ‘Good’ – did he write better the second time around?

Author Robert Louis Stevenson did, if we are to believe his wife. After he wrote the first draft of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, he showed it to his wife, Fanny, and told her he thought it was his greatest work. Her reaction? She threw the manuscript on the fire.

Her motives are not entirely clear. Some say Fanny was of the opinion thatDr Jekyll and his duality were distasteful, and that Stevenson had cheapened himself by writing a shilling shocker. Others believe her act was driven by literary criticism, albeit taken to the extreme.

For the next three days Robert Louis Stevenson wrote tirelessly, penning 10,000 words each day, until a manuscript for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was once more in existence. Weeks later, the novel was in print, and from there it became hugely popular worldwide and brought in a solid income that rescued the couple from poverty.

One has to wonder – would the original manuscript have done so well? Was the second better? How did Stevenson feel about his wife’s act? Did it energise him to write better, faster? Did he speed through the rewrite to recapture what had been in his mind or to stave off her criticisms – to show her it was a decent book after all? Did the violence of her act feed into the darkness of the novel he then wrote? Did the literal destruction of the initial flaws create a clean slate on which to write, unfettered by that which came before?

Certainly, there are lessons to learn from both of these stories of literary loss. It is all right to start again. It is all right to let go of words. But it is not all right to entrust your beloved work to someone prone to either losing or burning things!