My partner, Mark, is a packrat. While he has tried hard to “purge” his various collections in between moves, we still have closets, and an outbuilding, filled with boxes of ephemera from his youth. Some of it includes things he’s written, things he would probably say he’s embarrassed by. Yet still he holds on.
This gives me plenty of opportunity to tease (or taunt) him about it. Why be so sentimental?
After reading “Looking Back,” by Andrew Porter, perhaps I’ll become more sympathetic. He writes:
There are any number of reasons for why stories get orphaned and forgotten, why they get sent to the darkest corners of our hard drives. Sometimes they may belong there, but other times I think they remain there simply because we’ve chosen to forget them, or worse, because we’ve given up on them. … [I tell students] if there’s something at the heart of the story that still interests them, that keeps pulling them back, that still haunts them years later, then that’s probably a sign that there’s something worth struggling for there, that somewhere, in the midst of all that mess, they might even find some of their very best work.
Also this month from Glimmer Train:
- A 100% Rejection Rate by Weike Wang
- Some Lessons Learned by Bipin Aurora
- On Gathering Material by Stefanie Freele
- Laying Fiction Over History by Peter Ho Davies
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
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I was able to drag myself out of “retirement from writing” by digging my old stories from my dusty brain. Twenty years down the road, I didn’t have the papers, and that was for the best. I forgot the rubbish parts and remembered the good stuff, and came at it with a fresh outlook because it was, after all, twenty years down the road.
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