Just a tip: revisiting the junk drawer

Giving old (and embarrassing) stories another life

Open the junk drawer, take a deep breath, and close it again.

Did you hear that? That's the sound of all the little writing projects you tried in the past. You know, the ones you threw in a drawer and prayed never would see the light of day, because they're just so bad?

Come on, don't lie about it. Everybody's got them. I have them, you have them, your favorite authors have them. We've all written terrible things. Poems, essays, short stories, fully-fledged nearly-published books. And yes, it's easy to throw them in the darkness of a desk where nobody will (hopefully) ever read them again.

Guess what? There's good news.

It's easy to believe that those words were in vain. The characters suck, the setting's flat, the action is, well, mostly talking, the vocabulary is stilted, and- you get the picture. You know what's wrong with it. You wrote it. You're the one who'd turn scarlet if somebody ever accidentally read it. Nothing says "I write good things!" like an early-on practice run.

But believe it or not, it's not all bad. In fact, those things you call failures? They're awesome. They changed everything. They don't seem like much right now, with their flat settings and gross characters and plot that doesn't make any sense, but I promise, they're one of the best things that ever happened to you.

Why? Because you wrote those, and that's why you're here today.

Think about it! Half of success is not giving up when everybody else does, right? The ones we put on pedestals and call the kings and queens didn't just give up on themselves. They didn't receive one rejection letter and throw in the towel. They didn't erase the first sentence, shut down the computer, and swear off writing altogether.

No! They kept writing! Just like you!

Listen. Anybody can give up. By writing those pages in your junk drawer, you learned. Even if it didn't come out the right way, you likely figured out how you didn't want it to sound.

You could make the argument that those stories are over. You had the idea, you typed it out, and now they've been told. You don't need to revisit them. No editing, no reworking. It's over. Let them die in peace.

Or... you could give them another shot.

Somewhere buried in the darkest shadows of my computer is a sci-fi serial around 30k words. I still love the idea behind it. And the episodes are... not great. They'd do in a pinch, and they get the story across, but they're just not very fun to read. It sucks to think stuff like that about your own work, but honestly, nobody else should read these. They sound like this:

Mark stood up from his black leather chair, walked past the 25th floor wall of glass with its pleasant view of the skyline, and stopped in the far corner of the room. A pair of dark leather seats sat under a gilded painting of BLISS’ founder, Thaddeus Lissander. Between them stood a podium that glowed softly. Under its glass cover lay two matching cables, hidden from dust and the passage of time. Mark opened it reverently, picking up the first cable like an old friend.

Mary stood on her tiptoes to peer over his shoulder. “Cables?” she asked, with an air of disbelief. “We can’t just do this, like…” she pointed to his head, then drew a line in the air to her own. “… that?”

“No.” Mark sat down on one of the couches, the cable in his hand. He’d been waiting for this moment for so long, but now… it didn’t feel as freeing as it should. There were so many things left undone, and now they were in somebody else’s hands. Her hands.

He glanced over at Mary, who was staring suspiciously at the other cable. “This isn’t a scam, is it?” she asked dubiously. “One of those reality shows where you download a ton of crap in my head and ruin my life forever?”

Mark resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Just sit down.”

Mary’s lips twisted. “I mean, it would be a lot safer if we did it virtually. I don’t know everything that goes into the transition, but-“

“There’s too much,” Mark said, cutting her off. “There’s only so much the program can handle, and this is more than that. This is one hundred and thirteen years of information. That’s far more than it can handle in a single download.”

“Okay, fine, geez.” Mary slid onto the other couch. She picked up the cable with two fingers and stared at it. “What do I do?”

“Plug it in.”

Mary wrinkled her nose and started to complain, but dropped off when she saw the look on Mark’s face. Instead, she reached up to her sparkly hair clip and pulled it out carefully. A small square of bare skin lay underneath.  “Okay. I guess.”

Mark reached up to the side of his head. Just above his left ear, he brushed aside a lock of hair to reveal a matching patch of bare skin. A small silver circle glinted in the center. He held up the plug. “On the count of three.”

“Why is that important?”

“It has to be simultaneous, or it won’t work.”

“Fine.” Mary felt the skin where the clip had been. Her fingers found a small hole, drilled about two years ago. She’d never thought it would be necessary, but it was easier to be upsold than have another surgery later. “Ready.”

“One.” Mark’s fingers curled tighter around his cable. Now wasn’t the time to second-guess his decision to leave. “Two.”

Mary took a deep breath and held her cable up to the hole in her head. “Three.”

Is it a story? Yes. Is it choppy, unfinished, and not very interesting? Also yes.

But the bones are there. I still like the original idea. I'm not ready to give up on it yet.

One of the biggest struggles of a beginning writer is this: you have an idea, it's awesome, but you're not sure if you should write it, because it might suck.

Here's the truth: it probably will suck. But that's okay.

Everybody's work sucks in the beginning. Stephen King's work sucked in the beginning. So did Nora Robert's. And James Patterson's. Literally every book you've seen on a shelf started with somebody who stared at their screen or a pen and paper or a typewriter and wondered if they had any business doing this at all.

And surprise, surprise! It probably sucked. Just like yours (and mine).

But those ideas aren't dead. There's still time to breathe life into them. To fix them, to make them new again. Stories aren't finished just because they're typed out. Some of those tellings won't fit. As you grow as a writer, you'll have the opportunity to revisit old ideas. Tales that stuck in your head can be improved or rewritten entirely. Nothing is permanent in the draft phase. Even if you thought it was done, but you'd like to try again, you should do it. It's your story. Who's going to tell you it's wrong?

Oh! And before you think that I'm suggesting that you rewrite every single thing you've done so far, please rest assured that I am not. I'm just pointing out that as the writer, you have the opportunity to change something you're not happy with. It's not done. You just stopped writing.

This month, I'll be digging through my own junk drawer to see what I can rework. I've got some ideas for the piece above, too, which I'll hopefully be sharing in finished serial-form in the future. The first draft pieces were pretty terrible, but that's because I didn't have the skills to give them a good life. This time I feel good about it. Maybe it'll come together.

If not, I can always write it again.

What stories lurk in your junk drawer? Would you consider giving them another shot, or are you ready to move on to the next one?