About this time last year, I wrote in this space about how, during an attempt at housecleaning, I rediscovered of my old writings–college-ruled notebooks-as-journals, note pads and scraps of paper containing early drafts of short stories and essays and (mostly) notes about story ideas–and decided to investigate whether any of these old scribblings had any merit.
“Much of the writing,” I wrote in that April 2024 blog post, “was not good, and I don’t know why I’d bothered to keep these pages upon pages of scribblings for all these years. I’m sure I thought I would return to them some day and rediscover their brilliance.
“But some of the writing, I must admit, was pretty good, or so it seems to me,” I continued. “I read through a few pages and thought these words might be worth re-examining in a new light and perhaps reconsidering, either as stories and essays in their own right or as ingredients for some yet-to-be-created writing.”
I’m happy to report that some of the material I uncovered that day has found its way to publication, to wit:
- “The Things My Father Used to Eat,” a hybrid fiction-creative nonfiction piece I wrote in the 1990s. I tightened the piece to get it under 1,000 words and submitted it to Club Plum Literary Journal, which published the piece last July.
- “Lower Strata,” a short story published in Spillwords last November.
I’m still reworking some other old pieces from that spring cleaning adventure, still submitting some others but so far without success.
I guess the lesson here is that sometimes, rather than killing all our darlings, maybe we should set them aside for a while, then revisited them with fresh eyes and a fresh perspective.
Image by Mira Cosic, Astrologer from Pixabay.
Andy writes! 
I’ve been revisiting old writing off and on for a couple of years (in an attempt to purge paper piles from closet corners). I’ve transferred most of it from prediluvian papyrus to Word, although plenty of pages I judged unsalvageable and sent straight to the shredder. Now, if only I would open my tidy, slumbering digital files and start writing.
I also still have some digital drafts that I haven’t touched in some time. Some of them were even saved as WordPerfect (.wpd) files. Remember WordPerfect? Not quite antediluvian, but from the early, early digital age.
Oh my, WordPerfect. That’s what I used through high school. We didn’t have Microsoft Office at home. I loved the heck out of it back then. I think I still have a floppy disc with partially written plays and stories on it, that were in .wpd. I rescued them a few years ago, I think. Probably sitting on my OneDrive now.
The big thing for me is I went through a period of creative ideation where I outlined, wrote notes, and sometimes started drafting but never finished a lot of works. That was sometime around 2006 to 2014 or so. I have a lot of ideas I can always revisit. One I had that I think about sometimes was a modern retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo that involves the tech industry.
I’m currently planning to start writing a gothic horror story after I release Jonah of Olympic. That gothic horror story has been in idea form since 2010 or so, and I even wrote some chapters back then that I won’t look at until after I write by them. Don’t want their influence on current writing, but they may have ideas I can reuse.
I like your approach, Nat.
I learned a long time ago looking at writing that you plan to rewrite from scratch just clouds judgment because your brain wants to copy what you saw. Better to work from a vague memory of it. I do have a very visual memory, likely photographic memory. So looking at the text embeds it in my head and I just want to reproduce it.