Don't look back?
OK, so Hemingway (if it was Hemingway?) said that we can't call ourselves writers until we have a million words under our belts. For most budding authors, we know, the first or second manuscript is not the one that sells. So words under belts become books under beds. In my electronic bottom drawer I now have a collection of six completed novels which will never see the light of day. The question is, what to do with them?
I have frequently heard other writers talk about the 'cutting room floor', about going back to old, rejected work and plundering it for plot and character ideas. It's not a thing I've ever really done before, but I need a scene in my WIP in which a character visits her mother in psychiatric hospital. I was (since I have no imagination) basing it on the acute ward at our local one here, where I have many times visited students and colleagues (the university where I work being a major supplier of the psych beds), and was just beginning a spot of scene-setting when I remembered that in my last-book-but-four the MC visited a friend in (in my head) the exact same ward. So I looked it up to see if there was anything good in there I could nick.
There wasn't. The thing is that the way a character sees a place is so personal, isn't it? The voice and mood and tone and observations of my old MC were wholly inappropriate for the character in my WIP. She would just notice different things, feel different things. It made me wonder how it would ever be possible to graft things from an old book onto a new one, at least once the new one is up and running. I can imagine beginning a new book using one of the characters already formed from a failed work, and in fact I have done this, in a way, in my current WIP, with one character and story strand borrowed (though much adapted) from the novel I abandoned in October. But once the new book is up and running - how would anything ever fit?
The other thing that looking back did was depress me. I started reading the old book (a thing I have never done, once I have decided it's a no-hoper and moved on) and finding that I loved the people in it and was even quite pleased with a lot of the writing. And I started (fatally!) thinking of all that work, all those hours of getting each sentence exactly right, all for nothing. (It was the plot which just didn't hold up, I recall.)
Do you ever re-read abandoned works? Does it depress you? Of course, I recognise that writing is a learning experience - Hemingway's million words and all that - and that I may be a better writer for having spent the time slogging over that book. In that way, I can tell myself, it wasn't wasted. But now I'm seriously wondering if I'd be better never to look back - to assemble my six failed books and simply press 'delete'.
Litopia is the winner
True
Probably won't press 'delete', then!
Litlove, you are so right, with that comment about the call of the new work always being louder....
I remember finding the first
I remember finding the first ever novels I wrote, when I was 15 and 16. And funnily enough, they were better plotted than anything I'd done since, which was depressing, but full of factual errors, which were hilarious. I particularly enjoyed the fact that a grand party I'd written about had everyone in bed and asleep long before midnight.
I can well imagine that work doesn't transpose. But on the other hand, I also think that what you wrote most probably WAS really good, IS really good, but the moment for it wasn't right in the mind of your editor, agent, etc. I'll bet you could go back to them, and make rewrites and edits and perfections and resurrect those novels for another time. But the call of the new might just be louder.
Nooooo . . .
"And I started (fatally!) thinking of all that work, all those hours of getting each sentence exactly right, all for nothing."
- Argh! Please don't say that, Rosy, or it means all my writing so far has been a complete waste of time. I know you qualify it in the next paragraph, but . . . .
But, why delete your past work? I can understand feeling like that in a bad moment, but I really wouldn't do that, if i were you. Not necessarily because it might be plunderable at some later stage - as you say, it probably never will be in its present form - but it might contain ideas, characters, plot elements etc that are a springboard for new ideas. It's not as though it's taking up anything other than cyberpace in the meantime, and if you need to get rid of it as some kind of mental coping meachanism, you can alwyas hide it away in a folder somewhere you won't see it.
Canibalising
No Rosy, don't delete! That's the kind of stuff you might use for short stories, still in that frame with those characters - so it's all useable. You won't use it for another novel. You might, one day use some of it as a thread for a new novel, or re-write it from a different angle.
The poor old books aren't doing any harm just lying there so leave them alone; you never know when they'll come in handy
It's true, Cat - it's so hard
It's true, Cat - it's so hard to let go of the idea that a book might one day be knocked into shape, isn't it?
holy cow
But now I'm seriously wondering if I'd be better never to look back - to assemble my six failed books and simply press 'delete'.
If you did that, you would be...I don't know, what -- the strongest writer in the WORLD? Wow.
I don't have enough works under my belt for any of them to be really "abandoned," but I do sometimes roll my eyes over old high school/college poetry when I find it skulking around my hard drive or notebooks.
I agree with you about the way characters view situations, though, and how difficult it would be to salvage anything wholesale from an abandoned work for that reason.
(I will go ahead and whisper now that I harbor the insane yet firm belief that I will someday whip novel number one into some shape that is publishable. Even if I end up rewriting the whole thing from scratch. It's just a cracking good story that needs a more experienced mouth to tell it.)
Hemingway's million words
I don't know how many words he wrote [counting words was much more difficult in his days, no?], but he must be adding all the drafts to make them millions. I've read that he made 98 drafts of one of his top novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls. His final works showed, how much he had gained by writing millions of words.