Old Stories

I keep my old stories in an archive that I call the Oubliette. Because sometimes you write something that you end up just wanting to pitch down into the dark and walk away from.

There's sometimes a misconception, I think, that every piece of writing that a writer completes will be publishable (or at least useful) at some point down the road. Sure, we all hear about the "million words of crap" you have to write to get good at your craft. And yet, once you get to a certain point I think that there's this subconscious expectation that you are through with the crap.

My Viable Paradise classmate Jake Kerr once wrote something to the effect that he knows full well that not every story he writes deserves to be published. I know when I read that, I thought, "Oh!" with a small shock of realization. Because I had been thinking that every story that I had started or finished DID have to be good enough for that. At some point. In the far-distant future. After I had edited and re-written the hell out of it.

So, despite the fact that we know about the crap, sometimes I think our brains have a stubbornness about certain fragments or ideas. Perhaps these are the "darlings" we are supposed to kill (many times they probably are). But mightn't they also be…I dunno, vestigial bits of goo? Flapping their half-formed wings clumsily as they thrash about in much disorder, and yet hiding within their plasm a single perfectly-formed eye, or a hand crafted fine enough to assay Handel on the pianoforte?

I have formed the opinion that in every half-formed piece of crap there is a feisty dung-beetle that's actually a glittering scarab. When I look back at the stuff I have written, even as a kid, there is always SOMETHING there. A mood. The idea of a place. A line of description. (But never dialogue. I have always sucked at dialogue.)

There is the urge to stuff the crap into the Oublitte and never look at it again. The fear that it is, indeed, SO bad that reading through the thing will summon the gremlins of insecurity and doubt that writers and artists already spend too much time beating off with fireplace pokers (an ancient copy of Writers' Market works also).

I think this is a mistake. Often we wrote these things for the same reason we wrote the things that we think are really good: we had to. There was something about that idea that we had to explore. It had to come out. It did—perhaps badly. But that seed of what made you want to write about it is still there. Pull out that old story at the right time, and it might take light, like an ember, and tell you what it really wanted to be all along.