The bottom drawer
Failure can often be salutory. And if reflected on, a way of learning and improving. One of the emails I get on a regular basis is from the speculative fiction writer J S Morin who writes about this scrapheaps. Taht is, failed projects. There are completed stories and those that ground to a shuddering halt. Reading the reasons Morin gives, one can understand the whys. Hearing of such story fails is informative and highlights the perils of story generation. Or thinking, as Morin does, that a cool idea that comes in the night is going to be that killer story. All too often the unformulated idea is deficient in one way.
In fact, I believe that writers need these fails in order to suceed. Elsewhere on my website, I have posted incomplete stories. In some cases, as with the Warhammer ones I wrote, I have a good idea of how they will end and could, if motivated enough, finish them. But they wouldn’t be published given Games Workshop publishing approach.
Other of my stories started out as bright stars and crashed due to structural faults or story concepts, as Morin highlights, that are unsuited to the idea or simply very underdeveloped and when fleshed out, fail the good story test.
Yet even when the story is a beast and after struggling with it and realising it is not worth finishing or as I have found, not having a good climax, one is loath to abandon one’s creation. I have several such stories in my bottom drawer that I promise myself, “One day I’ll finish them.”
But will I?
In one or two instances, yes. The third book in my steampunk novels, I will write. It is a factor of incentive not structure. Others, such as my reworking of the sleeping beauty story, no so likely. It started well, and I have put the beginning on this site. But later, it fell apart even though I had a reasonable ending. Is it worth saving? I don’t think so and perhaps one day I’ll work it up and add it to the collection here.
The bottom line is that the creative process is messy. One feels one uses up a lot of time and energy on deadends. I’ve tried planning the story. This doesn’t seem to help much. I am more of the sketch it out and fill it in as you go along type. The detailing evolves as I write and trying to run this ahead of the story doesn’t seem to work for me. It works fine for others and that just goes to show that we are all different. I bet there are authors out there who don’t waste a word. Or at least say they don’t. But I’m willing to bet they have their secret bottom drawers.