Last year, I had a story I was working on for a gift for my sister based of a prompt she had given me that she liked the idea of. I spent months working on this thing, and hated every single draft and version I came up with. But I kept trying. By the fourth or fifth try, I finally had enough and shelved the whole thing. Over-writing or over-working an idea is very, very, real and can be incredibly frustrating. You’ll keep telling yourself “oh this is a great idea. I just have to change this one thing” and then one becomes a dozen. Becomes an entirely new plot outline. Which then becomes fodder for the “forget it” folder.
In the moment, everything can seem terrible from a failed draft or project. You look at the time and the amount of the energy you poured into a piece that didn’t get accepted for a competition letter, or maybe that you got a rejection letter from a query on and only see a waste. Or if you’re like me, you look at that “forget it” folder in your filing cabinet and see years of ADHD that went untreated. Right story (maybe) at the wrong time (definitely). In a lifetime when you only have so many stories to write, what do you do with the things that didn’t work?
Over the last week or two, I picked back up the folder with that failed gift, to give it another read. There, amongst the ashes of a story that might have worked in eighteen other ways, I found it. A single character that meant absolutely nothing to that story as a whole, but might be interesting pulled out of it. A few hours later, I had a two thousand word short story that was nothing like what they started out in. But it worked, and I LIKED it.
It’s sort of like a forest fire. When they’re left to rage uncontrolled, they’re detrimental and dangerous. But contained, they promote healthy forest growth and are a natural part of the cycle of things. Sometimes, it’s okay to burn in order to foster new, healthy growth.
Or in my case, find an asexual pirate who accidentally becomes best friends with the Siren family that was going to eat his whole crew.
Macabress Manuscripts 