They Linger On

I realized this week that I've given up on my early stories. I've been writing since I was in fifth grade, but I hit my stride in high school, churning out story after story, some short but with several longer works each clocking in at around two hundred pages typed. While I knew that the writing itself was not the best, I cared deeply about some of the characters I created, and the stories mattered to me. They matter still. I always thought that I would go back and take up the storylines again, re-write them to be worthy of being published. Slowly that thought has eroded away, and now I no longer want to revisit them. Writing them was practice. Even if I were to become a wildly-successful novelist, those early stories should never see the light of day. I wouldn't want them to, for that matter, as they do not represent my best efforts. These stories are alive only to me, and just barely at that. I wonder how many other stories share the same fate--to have their author spend hours and hours on them only to leave them in the end, quietly sitting in a desk drawer, a forgotten file, an old floppy disk somewhere?

The world must be littered with these dead stories. Stories envisioned in the mind of an author but never written down. Stories written but unpublished, ones that few beyond the author have seen. Mostly, this is for the best. Just as I would really prefer my earlier writing remain unseen, some well-known authors feel the same. Brandon Sanderson wrote, by his estimate, at least five novels before he felt he was a strong enough writer to seek publication. The second novel of Terry Brooks remains unpublished, and never will be, as many elements of it were incorporated into a later, published work. Yet sometimes, this is nothing short of a tragedy, as even unpolished stories, released after the death of the author, are nothing short of marvelous. I think of the essays of Marina Keegan, drafts of my great-grandmother's poems, and over forty years of previously unpublished works and notes by Tolkien. These stories, not quite finished, some in very early stages, still manage to be moving by turns, the author's death all the more tragic because of that lost promise, that last story never fully finished. The younger the author, the more true this seems to be. Sometimes the stories are all the more haunting in considering the death of the author. 

Even if they are never published at all, these dead stories were not wastes of effort. Each time we write we engage in a little act of creation, a chance to say something new, something that only we can say. Each story is a strike against the blank page that mocks us, the writer's block that tries to stop us in our tracks. Whether the story is alive or dead, I believe that each work we write contains a piece of us, a little soul-shard that goes out into the world and stays long after we're gone. This is one of the few measures of immortality we may hope for; in putting words to paper, we freeze a moment in time. Even centuries may pass, but the voice of an author is preserved and can be heard again afresh when their words are read. We ourselves must die, eventually, but what we write lingers on.