19 November 2022

Treasures from the Sock Drawer



Like all writers, I have a lot of ideas for stories. When one of them occurs to me, I try first to figure out whether it's marketable, and if I think it is I go ahead and write the story. If the idea seems a little anemic, I store it away until I can (1) develop it into something better or (2) combine it with another idea. Several stories that I've written lately have come from this second approach.

Most ideas seem to appear to me from thin air, but sometimes I see a call for a short-story anthology whose theme kicks off an idea that might not have happened otherwise. (Barb Goffman's Crime Travel was one of those, and Michael Bracken's Jukes & Tonks, and a couple of Josh Pachter's music-themed anthologies.) At other times--not often--I go back to ideas that I had and stories that I wrote many years ago, stories that I felt weren't strong enough to submit. And whenever I dig those manuscripts out from under the bed or from the back of my sock drawer and look at them I usually realize how good a decision it was to hide those stories from any chance of public view. Most of them were terrible, and serve to remind me of just how little I knew when I first started trying to write short fiction.

But now and then I find that some of those old stories can be repaired and made presentable, and when that happens it's like finding a silver dollar on the sidewalk, or a free gift among all the bills in your mailbox, or a pair of clean underwear in your dorm room in college. In other words, a pleasant surprise. And the rewriting of some of those old manuscripts can actually be enjoyable.

Most of my favorite stories have been written fast: I get an idea, think about it a while, write the story, edit it, and send it off to a market. But a few of my favorite published stories didn't start out as a blinding bolt from the blue; they came from unearthing those aforementioned old stories and trying to breathe new life into them. One of those was "Molly's Plan," a dot-matrix-printed manuscript about a bank heist that I found hidden not in my sock drawer but in a cardboard box on the bottom shelf of a closet in one of our back bedrooms. I took it out, dusted it off, worked on it for a week or two, and sent it to Strand Magazine in the spring of 2014. It wound up getting published there, went on to be selected for Best American Mystery Stories the following year, and has since been reprinted overseas, considered for film, and chosen for inclusion in the permanent digital archives of the New York Public Library. Another was "Calculus I," an unsubmitted and forgotten story I'd written in the mid-'90s about two engineering students' plan to cheat on a college exam. I found the manuscript, rewrote and retitled it, and sold it in 2019 to the print edition of The Saturday Evening Post and later to a foreign publisher. I usually judge the worth of my stories by how much fun they were to write, and I had a great time writing (in this case, rewriting) both of those. And I almost missed them completely.

A few weeks ago I found several more of those old unsubmitted manuscripts in the back of one of my file cabinets (I'm not the most organized person in the world), and while two or three of those stories look promising, the others are probably too weak to ever grow into anything more. I won't throw them away--I never throw away anything I've started writing--but if I use them at all it might be to try to salvage some parts and pieces from them to insert into something more current.

Okay, question time. Have any of you writers discovered older stories in your files that you later reworked and marketed? Any success with those? Do you have other projects (teaching moments?) that you gave up on and will probably never revive? Do any of you save your story ideas for later use? How and where do you save them? In your head? In a Word file? In the "notes" app on your phone? Do your story ideas usually come in a burst of heavenly light, or do they seep in during deep thought, or come from "prompts" like anthology submission calls or themed issues of a magazine? Please let me know, in the comments.

As for my situation, I have re-filed several of those old manustcripts that I recently found--this time I put them in a folder called "in progress" (a hopeful label if ever I heard one)--and I'm actively reworking the others. If I'm lucky you'll soon see those somewhere in a publication. And meanwhile, I'm trying to stay alert to any new ideas that happen to come along.

One last observation: They can be quick as rabbits, these story ideas, and if you're not careful they show up and then scurry off into the bushes before you can grab them and hold on. Especially those that appear in the middle of the night. But when you do catch one, and when it turns out to be something you can develop into a story you're proud of . . . well, that makes all this worthwhile.

Good hunting, to all of us.


16 comments:

  1. Although I lost some work many years ago when my neighborhood flooded and water poured into the basement, I've never intentionally destroyed or thrown away anything I've written.

    I'm constantly trolling my partially written ms., seeing if any of the ideas spark my imagination, and this past week I've been working on two stories I'd started awhile back (one two years ago, the other a year-and-a-half ago). I might finish them soon...or they might lay dormant again for awhile.

    And the trick isn't to grab just one idea rabbit. If you can grab two and get them to mate you'll soon be drowning in idea rabbits!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey Michael. Yep, I suspected you're like me in that you often try to revive those old and dusty (but never forgotten) stories or partial stories. Why not?

      I like your suggestion to put two different ideas together. One of my recent AHMM stories (in the Sep/Oct issue) and one coming up in the Jan/Feb 2023 issue were both created by combining two different mystery ideas into single stories. If you can (as you said) get those separate ideas to mate, you'll have a longer and more satisfying story. I like it when seemingly unrelated plots tie together in the end.

      Good luck on the two you're currently revising!

      Delete
  2. Thanks for this, John! Love that--idea rabbits! :-) And yes, I started a short story years ago that eventually turned into my novel, DYE, DYEING, DEAD. It made the rounds, editors liked it but back then they didn't quite know what to do with such a story. I also keep almost everything I write and sometimes combine bits of dialogue or description from one to the other. Most of my older ones are on an ancient Mac but I've started printing them out because it's easier for me to "see" the story. I will admit that the ones where I got a flash of inspiration and sat down to write were the ones that were more easily published.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Interesting! Glad to hear that short story wound up becoming your novel. Some famous writer (Hemingway?) once said he never started out to write a novel--he just wrote short stories that eventually got too long.

      I agree that it's a good idea to hold onto the stuff that you gave up on. I know from experience that some of those can be resurrected, even if only to--as you said--provide bits of dialogue or description. But if you throw it away, it's gone for good.

      Interesting also that you've found the stories that came in one big burst of an idea are the ones you've more easily published. Is this a crazy business, or what?

      Thanks for the thoughts.

      Delete
  3. Oh, sorry, didn't mean to post as Anonymous. It's me. LOL.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Interesting timing on this article. I just today pulled out an old unsold story that I believe I can revise.
    I also like the two idea rabbits. The stories I am most pleased with usually started with a single idea that, once I started writing drafts, mated with another idea.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Bob. I think the merging of two separate ideas, and sometimes two separate mysteries, does work well at times. Sometimes that happens to me the way you described it, after I've already starting writing a story, and at other times I have the two separate ideas in my head when the writing begins (I'm sort of an outliner, and plan a lot before I start typing).

      Best of luck to you on updating that old story! They truly can be hidden gems.

      Delete
  5. Great post. Yes, I had a sci-fi story that got no love in the slush piles, so I forgot about it. A year later, I cleaned it up, changed the characters, and re-submitted it. It made the cover story for Mystery Magazine in June, 2020.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ha! Good for you. I love to hear things like that. Main thing is, you forgot about it and then remembered! Sometimes a few changes (and maybe the benefit of added experience with the passage of time) is all it takes.

      Thanks, Mike.

      Delete
  6. My amazing tale of a very old story making it is "Zoo Story", which I wrote in 1981 and sold to AHMM (with very little revision) in 1999. Never, ever give up.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So true, Eve. Every beginning writer should hear stories like that. Keep writing, keep trying to learn new things, and never give up on any story, and certainly don't ever give up on writing. I still like the old saying, "There's a lot of attrition among writers--so don't attrit.")

      Delete
  7. John, I don't breed, I whittle. The short story that one day, we all hope, will appear in the SleuthSayers anthology started out as my first mystery novel, written in the 1970s and so embarrassingly bad that I'm not only glad it never got published but have not re-read all the way through. I just flipped through enough of it to rev my engine before starting the new story. The long adventure story that's next up in AHMM (March/April 2023) started life in a Mendoza Family Saga novel I did tons of research for but never finished after the first book did well but not well enough for the publisher and the second did miserably with another publisher. I think I was still using paper and pen when I cut a 70,000-word Bruce Kohler novel that legendary editor Ruth Cavin had rejected after publishing the first and accepting what became the second in the series down to a much, much better 20,000-word novella, Death Will Save Your Life. It was first published by Edgar-winning author Julie Smith's e-book press and is currently among the Bruce novels and stories available on Amazon. I keep stories I've started as partial mss and/or Notes or in some cases titles only (since they're sometimes my starting point) in Word docs in a folder called Stories in Progress or Stories Active, depending which computer I'm on. I also save everything on my iCloud Drive these days, so I can get to the latest version no matter which computer I'm on and no matter where I am geographically, because you never know.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey Liz. Sounds as if you're as organized as I am disorganized.

      Interesting, that your story in the (hopefully) upcoming SleuthSayers antho started out as your first mystery novel. Now THAT was some serious cutting, right? And so was taking that 70K manuscript down to 20. Good for you!

      Congratulations once again on the success of both those series. And thanks as always, for checking in here.

      Delete
  8. I'm another pack rat. I never throw away anything and sometimes find a way to recycle a scene or character into another story. My favorite example is a novel that didn't work back in about 2012--but I managed to recycle several of the characters with only minor changes into what became The Kids Are All Right. That was a finalist for the Shamus. I also had a short story I eventually revised into a novella and it won the Black Orchid Novella Award after several rejections as a short story with too many characters and too much going on.

    In 2020, I sold a story that first went out in 2005 and collected rejections until I ran out of places to send it. I knew the story was good and tinkering would only hurt it, so I waited. Sure enough, a new market opened up. I've sold three or four stories after a long wait.

    On the other hand, I have three or four stories I really like that go back as far as 2007 that never sold. Two of them have gone out in several different forms and revisions, and I'm afraid they're doomed to be orphans.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Steve, there are always a few orphans in every writer's files, but I try to never give up on them. Congratulations on your many successes with rewritten/recycled stories.

      I was a little surprised to hear about your short story that later became an award-winning novella. It's easy for me to cut words from a story that's been having trouble selling, but it's harder (again, for me) to *add* words to a story. Even though they're sometimes needed, it's hard for me to shake the feeling that I'm adding "filler" rather than important information. But it sure worked for you!

      Keep up the good writing, and thanks as always for the comment!

      Delete

Welcome. Please feel free to comment.

Our corporate secretary is notoriously lax when it comes to comments trapped in the spam folder. It may take Velma a few days to notice, usually after digging in a bottom drawer for a packet of seamed hose, a .38, her flask, or a cigarette.

She’s also sarcastically flip-lipped, but where else can a P.I. find a gal who can wield a candlestick phone, a typewriter, and a gat all at the same time? So bear with us, we value your comment. Once she finishes her Fatima Long Gold.

You can format HTML codes of <b>bold</b>, <i>italics</i>, and links: <a href="https://about.me/SleuthSayers">SleuthSayers</a>