For the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about the old mss left unfinished. Some are in my computer. Some of them are on paper, stacked in a closet, shoved into the back where I can’t see them. That’s probably a good thing because if they were visible I’d pull them out and litter my desk with them.
There’s nothing wrong with any one of them, and several came very close to a sale. But there is something not quite right. Every writer knows what I’m talking about—the story we loved and worked on and with a gasp of hope sent off to an editor or an agent. And then it sat there, on someone’s computer or desk, gathering dust of being pushed lower and lower on the list of titles in the TBR file. The question becomes, what do we do with them? Do we reread and rework them? That’s a definite possibility. The more I learn, the more I rethink what I’ve done and recognize where I could have improved the story by changing the setting, developing the villain more, heightening the tension, or removing the extra secondary characters. But I don’t do these things in a novel. I might do some in a short story, but not in a longer work. And I think I know why.
Some years ago I was an avid fan of Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion mysteries. The first one appeared in 1929, The Crime at Black Dudley, and others followed fairly regularly into the 1960s. I don’t know if many people read her work anymore, but she was considered one of the great British mystery writers of her time. After reading through her entire list including a couple of novellas, I came across her first mystery, The White Cottage Mystery, published in 1928. This is only a year before her first Albert Campion story. And I was startled at the difference between the two., and the extent of her growth and development as a writer between her first and her second book. It’s an experience I have always remembered.
We grow and change as writers. If our work sounds the same year after year, we’re not growing and it’s time to stop and ask why. I don’t want to write the same book year after year. There has to be something different, some sign of a new perspective, a new challenge. I can see this same ambition in some of the writers I read, but not in others.
When I pulled out some of my old mss and had the passing thought of rewriting and updating them, I was frozen, and here I think I was so for a good reason. Whoever I was back then I am not her now. To bring one of those old mss up to the level I would want to write today would be to dismantle and basically erase it. Each line, each feeling and action would have to be different because I’m different. The story was good for its time and in some instances that’s twenty or more years ago. I was different and the world was different.
I’m in a long phase of decluttering the house I’ve lived in for over forty years, but I doubt I’ll toss out those mss, not just yet. Each one tells me something about writing, finding a voice, developing a voice through time, challenging ideas and creating new ones. I liked some of those stories more than others, and the failure of some weighed on me more than others, but like any other experience that comes to an end, I let those novels go and moved on.
The one important thing I remember is that even though they didn’t sell, they made me the writer I am today, with their lessons and discoveries, their pitfalls and graces. For that alone I will probably keep them for a while longer.
Ladies of Mystery 
Beautifully put, Susan, and a very positive take on it. I have a couple of short stories that didn’t quite work, redid them into the ground, they still don’t quite work, but I hang onto them. They, as you say, make us the writers we are today. Thanks for the insight!
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I can only be embarrassed by my earliest efforts, so I set them to a positive spin and I feel much better. There has to be some reward for all that early effort.
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You have been peeking into my life. So far I have reused an idea or a basic plot line or two, but never a completed book. And for good reason. Yet I can’t make myself just toss the old manuscripts. There is too much hope, too much pain, too much learning in those dog-eared pages. So – as I usually do – I am compromising. I am keeping every word I ever wrote (including some really embarrassing juvenilia) just in case someone thinks I should be immortalized in a museum somewhere. I have set myself a task of scanning these old mss – a small chore for a rainy day, or when I need something to with my hands while my brain works on something else – onto some rewriteable DVDs. That way my deathless prose will last, but I don’t feel obligated to hang onto box after box (I have been writing for a looooong time!) of dirty and deteriorating paper. Probably the DVDs will never be opened, but that’s not my problem. The words are saved, and they will be there if they are ever wanted.
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You have more energy than I have–I sag at the thought of putting everything on DVDs. But it is a good idea, and if I ever find myself with some free time, I’ll give it a try. As for preserving “my papers” for posterity, that’s a topic for another time, and one that bedevils me now.
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Susan, I have similar stories sitting in boxes on in documents that had something wrong that a the time I didn’t know what. Now as I’ve written more and learned more, I know what’s wrong but I would have to change too much to bring them to the present and I’m not infatuated with the stories any more so they stay “retired” in their boxes or files. Great post!
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Every time I think about getting rid of the old mss I remind myself of how much I have learned from them and since writing them, so I keep them. It’s like keeping old photographs–I don’t really want anyone to see what I looked like years ago, but I don’t want to toss them either.
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Going back 40 years is challenging. But if you can see a place for it in your series, then you have motivation and a path forward. It’s tough staring down at a sentence that has a different rhythm, different syntax from your current work, but I hope you get where you want to go.
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Hoo, boy, do your words about “drawer navels” rings true! I currently struggle to bring a 40-year-old manuscript of my somewhat clueless young mid-age up to my current standards, and it sucks my writing passion away. Yet it can be a prequel to one of my published cozy series!
I must grit my teeth and finish reading (or skimming) the thing, so I. might move forward–one way or another!
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My reply got posted above (my non-tech problems).
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