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.