Five more entries to go in 2018, so I thought I’d do a bit of an overview of things I’ve been doing or thinking about over the course of the year, building up to my new writing plans for 2019.
I’ve trunked a lot of my ideas over the years. It’s no big surprise…it’s par for the course for pretty much every writer. I still think about them every now and again, maybe even wondering if they could ever be revived now that I’m a better writer (albeit jokingly — I don’t plan on doing this IRL at all). Depending on when I started them, I pretty much have them collecting dust on a bookshelf or getting forgotten in some folder on my external drive.
When I think of trunked ideas, I think of one of the plot points in Jack London’s Martin Eden, one of the few books assigned to me in school that I truly enjoyed. He’s a writer who can’t seem to get an even break, but once he does, it snowballs to the point where he’s digging out his older work, revising it, and his readers keep eating it up. Thing is, he’s not doing all this for himself; he’s trying to impress a girl. Interestingly, London pulls this idea off by not blaming her disinterest for his downfall, but by having Martin realize he alone is at fault, thinking ‘wow…I really wasted a lot of my life trying to impress everyone and making myself miserable.’
I don’t think I’ve wasted my years with all those failed writing projects. I knew well enough to give up on them when the time came. I realized the most common sign is when the writing feels more like a chore than a project. [Not to be confused with that feeling of failure we writers often get during the revision process — you know, the oh god this sucks why am I still working on it phase. Truth: I’m going through this with In My Blue World as we speak. And yet I still have faith in it, and will see it through to its conclusion.]
Sometimes the ideas are little more than moods or images; they won’t or can’t be expanded into novels, or even short stories. Sometimes the story is a little too uncomfortable to write. Sometimes I get through the main planning stage, or even the first draft, and realize how much of an unsavable mess it is. Regardless of what level I get to it, I’ll have to make a decision: keep moving along with it, or file it away and try something else.
I did a lot of this in 2018. While I released Meet the Lidwells and started work on In My Blue World and the Apartment Complex stories, I had so many other project ideas kicking around that I realized I no longer had any interest in. I decided it was probably time for me to trunk nearly everything else that was still up in the air; I just did not feel connected to them anymore. I’d still feel a “hey this might be fun” wave of interest, but that’s all. And I can’t base an entire project on that.
I think part of it was also completing the Apartment Complex story. That novel is…different. Very different from a lot of what I’ve written in the past. Even the current past. It resonated with me in a way that none of my previous novels ever did, even the trilogy. It felt like a gigantic step forward, and a step away from the work I’ve done in the past. It felt that this was the direction I needed to go in next, and almost none of my backburner projects fit that mold.
In short, I felt I was closing down one part of my life and writing career, and moving on to a newer, better one. I had to leave the old stories behind.
I’m looking forward to 2019 being part of that newer, better life and career. And I’m definitely looking forward to the newer stories, whatever they may be.
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