Tangled up in all those things I didn't write
...and what to do with them.
In conversation over dinner yesterday I mentioned to someone an idea I’d had for a story some while ago. They were enthusiastic; said it sounded interesting. So this morning I thought I’d see if I could dig it out…
…just to see.
The subsequent experience was sobering - yet at the same time energising, daunting, filled with both possibility and regret.
The process was simple.
I opened ‘Finder’ on my Mac and looked through the folders where I keep ‘old stuff’ broken down by year: pre-2020 and then annually since then. I found the story I’d mentioned over dinner - “A Question of Provenance” - plus a whole host of other things I’d started and, for one reason or another, abandoned. Most of these are at least five years old (some I recall hardly at all).
I think over the years I have become a little better at honing-in on what I want to write - but that isn’t to say that these variously developed projects are without merit. So the aforementioned regret comes from their abandonment; the energising possibility (and being daunted) comes from thinking I could easily pick them up again.
Partly as a kind of ‘cleansing’, and partly as an example of the decisions a writer has to make - the right and wrong turns taken, I suppose - I offer here a summary of all those projects that were once ‘work-in-progress’ and which could very easily be so again. Life breathed into Frankenstein’s monsters!
A Question of Provenance - a family’s history (early Victorian to the present day) told through the eyes of a painting. And the story is told chronologically backwards, so ends with the painting’s genesis. [All planned out; about 6k written.]
In Reality - a kid of dystopian tale about a reality TV show set on a moving train where individual carriages make up the various ‘sets’. [The train schema mapped out; about 4k written.]
The Idea that Fell to Earth - the main character in the story is an idea, the story is written from the idea’s perspective. [Interesting notion, but only sketched out, nothing written.]
The Impossible University - again a slightly dystopian story about a university whose subjects are experiential, emotional, rather than academic. [Not that well mapped out; the first chapter drafted.]
The Year of Funerals - a family saga based a round a single year during which a number of the family die; one chapter for each month. [Fully mapped out; January drafted (6.6k words).]
The Man Who Waited for Wednesday - the story of a procrastinator, and what incessant delay costs him. [Partly planned, and the first part drafted. I actually used what I’d written as the basis for a short story, An Irregular Piece of Sky, in the collection of the same name.]
X - enigmatic right? I have no idea what this was about, even if I wrote over 4k words of it!
‘French thing’ - started when on holiday in France, this is a thriller of sorts; racy and dark. [Fully planned, I’ve actually written £38k words of this!]
The May Who Bought a Pier - a return to magic realism after The Big Frog Theory. This is the story of a man who inadvertently buys a seaside pier; it relates his adventures in the fun fair it contains. [Fully planned, 10k words drafted.]
Sleeping - this is (I think!) a very episodic story about a man who has trouble sleeping but when he does he is transported into a kind of dream-world (hence the ‘episodes’). [Not sure how much I’d comprehensively planned, but I have written 12k words.]
‘Z’ - a kind of portmanteau story with multiple characters (fifteen!) whose stories interlink. [Completely planned out; 32k words drafted.]
The Bubble Factory - futuristic and dystopian story revolving around the buying of dreams and experience. [Some planning done and a few thousand words drafted.]
[Many of these unfinished projects will have been referenced in my writing notebooks - collated in Shrapnel from a Writing Life.]
I know there are others, typed up, sitting in boxes in the garage - including, believe it or not, a children’s adventure story!
So some promise here, I think - and two novels that are about 40% written.
Perhaps one day I might decide to dust off some of the above… There’s more than enough to keep me busy! But with new ideas coming all the time… And I already have three new projects on the go…
Writing: a blessing and a curse.