How many stories have you buried? Maybe you scrawled a few pages here, jotted down notes there. Maybe you toiled and tried and agonized over a particular story, desperate to see it come together, but in the end…in the end, you had to put that sucker in the ground. Throw one last shovel full of dirt on top and drop a flower. Look around. You’re probably standing in a boot hill of makeshift memorials and failed story tombstones.
Here lies “Confessions of a Lumberjack Ballerina” – Never high kick when you’re wielding a chainsaw
“Bernie Franks – Hot Dog Private Eye” – Grilled by Many
You get the idea…experiments, stories that never took off. We relegate them to the backs of notebooks, old computer folders, or in the musty confines of a file cabinet. And there they sit, until…
…until the dead come back to life. Shuffle, shuffle…..
Put the pitchfork down! Some of these reanimated ideas may have legs! (Bad pun intended). You never know when an old idea can find life in a new form, genre, approach, or idea. And THAT is why we writers should be saving EVERYTHING we write. Even if we think we’d rather drop a bag of scorpions down our pants and wrestle hungry sharks than ever, EVER look at that scrap of story again.
Some times the reanimated story jumps out at you and infects you with a piece of it. Maybe it was the idea, or a scene, or a character. Maybe the whole story was not in the right genre or medium. Other times, the impact may be more subtle. You might be trolling through your files, folders, or notebooks and stumble across it. Intrigued, you read back through what you were doing and BAM! That moment was the right moment and you find life in what you thought was long since dead. With your most crazed Dr. Frankenstein impersonation, you can lift it above your head and shout “It’s alive! It’s ALIVE!!!!” (Do this when nobody is home, because, um…on a purely hypothetical note, your significant other could just happen to be peeking his/her head into your office to tell you that dinner is ready, leaving you both feeling slightly confused and awkward).
This same notion of rediscovery/reanimation holds true for stories we’ve put out to pasture or shipped off to the island of Finished Stories That Earned Their Keep.Take those suckers out of retirement and find a way to reuse/recycle them if the mood strikes you. It’s like a come back tour. Hey, celebrities do it. Or, you could just think of it as being eco-responsible in a non-earth relative way. Whatever, you’re recycling!
This just happened to me..twice, with two short stories. One was a big contest winner that was never published, but the idea really stuck with me. After revisiting it, it became a spark for a new YA novel that I am toying with. The second story was published long ago (not in a galaxy far away) in a very small online market. Again, the idea struck me as being great to translate into a picture book. So, that’s what I’m working on/storyboarding now.
What about you? Do you save everything? Have you ever found that you’d buried something alive or that an old story just refused to die? Let’s hear all about it. I KNOW I’m not the only Dr. Frankenstein out there shouting “It’s ALIVE!!!” …..at least I hope not…..
-JPM
