Out with the Old, in with the New

The trunk. Every author has one, even if it isn't a
literal steamer trunk. Maybe it's a filing cabinet, or
several cardboard boxes, but whatever it may be, it's
full olf manuscripts. All those stories that never
quite worked out, or were shopped around until they
simply ran out of potential markets, but you just
can't bear to throw them in the trash and be rid of
them once and for all.

Because maybe they aren't completely worthless.
There's something in them that is meaningful to you,
so you hang onto them in case one day there's hope you
could actually make them work, if you can just get the
right insight.

So from time to time you revisit those old stories,
try to see what it was that captured your imagination
and see if you can recapture the magic in a new way.
Who knows -- sometimes the new perspective of a more
mature writer is just what you need to finally do an
idea right that you botched when you were younger.

Recently I pulled up an old novel that I'd originally
written while I was in jr. high and high school. When
I was an undergraduate student, I played with the idea
again, deciding to set it on another planet in order
to remove some of the more absurd pseudo-historical
elements, and wrote out a complete end-to-end outline.
Due to time pressures, I never actually started
writing on the new version, and finally ended up
setting it aside.

Recently, I was looking for a straightforward novel
that I could write reasonably quickly, and decided to
pull it back out and take a stab at it. However, no
sooner than I'd begun, I realized that the outline as
it stood simply wasn't going to work. The first
chapter was hopelessly clichéd as an opening, so I
dumped it and took what would have been that
character's second chapter to make into a new first
chapter.

The more I looked through the existing outline, the
more problems I saw. One after another element of the
old story was going to have to be pulled out and
replaced with new ideas that would work better. Pretty
soon I could see that it was going to be useless for
anything except the most general of ideas as to where
I wanted the story to go. Far from having an
established roadmap to the story, I was going to have
to feel my way through from the beginning, hoping that
as I wrote each part, I would be able to see beyond it
far enough to keep going. And all the time I would
have to figure out how much of the old story I could
keep, and how much new material I will need.