Day 178

Trunk stories – those stories you never seem to finish

…

Yes, the ones that end up in a dark corner of the writing room, if you have one, simply because the ideas ran out, or the next move wasn’t clear.

I have stories like that, quite a few actually, and every now and then I rummage, find one, and make the centre of my next NaNoWriMo project. And since NaNoWriMo comes around twice a year, it means two have done stories come in from the cold.

But, this idea of picking up a story you wrote a long while ago but never finished, mainly because something was missing, is a good one, and recently while I was away, and trying not to work on a new project i found this story I write about thirty years ago, and actually did get to the end, but it wasn;t end I wanted.

So, each night I read a few chapters and made notes.

Then, at the end of the story, I could see what the problem was; it needed to have closure with another event that was overshadowing the life of the protagonist. I had at some point written in a new character, and hadn’t quite got the details right.

There was a hint of a resolution at the end, but it had been hastily put together, or if I knew the me back then, I had written the end long before I got to it, and failed to maintain the plotlines to support it.

Or maybe it just meant that the story had been running around inside my head for the intervening thirty years and now I knew what to write, or how I was going to get to that end.

It needed a lot of rewriting, and in the end, it virtually ends up as two stories, related but independent of each other.

Yes, I have piles of trunk stories, and yes, I do go back a little earlier than thirty years, and yes, some of them become projects that are completed to the first or second draft.