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 nearly 25 years working in the book publishing industry, with a focus on author education and trend reporting. She is the editor of The Hot Sheet, the essential publishing industry newsletter for authors, and was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World in 2023. Her latest book is The Business of Being a Writer (University of Chicago Press), which received a starred review from Library Journal. In addition to serving on grant panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Work Fund, she works with organizations such as The Authors Guild to bring transparency to the business of publishing.
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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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