Never, ever delete your old stories. Not even the ones you are really ashamed of and don't ever want to see again. Your stories are valuable, and they can be helpful in a few situations. Here are two.
First, you can get discouraged and feel as though you haven't matured at all as a writer. Reading those old stories will help you to see how far you've really come. Comparing yourself with successful, published authors is never helpful, but I feel like that's something all beginner authors struggle with. Instead, you can compare with your old work and see how far you come, rather than how far you have yet to go. Those published books have undergone several edits, (mine went through eight or nine edits and two full rewrites), and you are writing a first draft. Give yourself some room to make mistakes.
Second, your old stories can serve as starting points for new stories. Sometimes time gives you a different perspective on old thoughts, and you may want to start working on those stories again, but heading in a different direction. If you still have the old stories, you have the bones of characters and settings, which means less work for you. And less work is good, because people are lazy.
A third reason to look at your old stories is that sometimes, it's funny to see how astronomically bad at writing you were. I read the first novel that I ever attempted, and I just laugh at it. I've said in previous posts that I can tell exactly what books I was reading at the time, and it's true. I can totally tell that I was reading certain books when I started, and halfway through I changed parts of the plot to make it more like a different book that I was reading. My first novel was Frankenstein's monster, and I'm glad it's hidden on my laptop where no one will find it. But I will never delete it, because that is where I found my love for both the written word and creating entire universes inside my head.
Don't delete your stories. You'll end up regretting it.
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