Unfinished Writing Projects

 

One thing we all have in common as writers is unfinished projects. We let these documents exist on our hard drives or printed drafts that are then tucked away into folders we stuff into desk drawers. For fun (and out of curiosity!) I decided to go through the files on my computer and examine just a few of the drafts that have been left uncompleted. Maybe I’ll uncover something I want to revisit! 

In my fiction folder: 

Pieces of a novel titled “Crying Wolf” that I began in 2004. There are only a few chapters and an outline in the folder and I have no recollection of writing this. Based on the subject matter, I was working through frustrations with some uncomfortable family dynamics at the time. 

The first novel I ever completed, which has changed genres twice (from adult to young adult) and has evolved through at least three different titled changes. Completed but never published. 

A middle-grade time travel book titled “Camp Big and Bright.” Completed, but never published and needs revision. 

A young adult romance/thriller novel titled “Screen Play.” I sent the first few chapters off to Writer’s Digest for a critique by one of their contractors and was so mortified by her comments that I never opened the document again. 

My latest novel, a suspense/thriller, which a few agents requested but never offered representation. I’ve put it on hold for now, but it also needs more revision. 

A new draft of a novel, an adult contemporary time loop story, that has 6,000 words and a full outline in the folder. I’m currently back to working on this project. 

Short stories: 

I have a lot of completed drafts in this folder, some that have even won awards, but there are also drafts of only a few pages in at least three or four documents. This folder is worth revisiting because I think there are stories that could be submitted to various markets with beta readers, critiques, and additional revision. 

In my non-fiction folder: 

There’s a short piece I wrote fifteen years ago about the steps I went through to become a writer. Maybe that’s worth revisiting. I have several essays I’ve written, revised, and submitted to contests with no luck in the past several years. I can look for new markets for those. 

A full outline of a true crime book based on stories I’ve shared in my podcast has been completed. Text and sources have been transferred into this document—but it needs more work. 

I found a folder of a few drafts of blog posts from when my kids were still small, and I thought about breaking into “mommy blogging.” They are in their 20s now. I think I’ll just let those be. 

A draft of an essay I started writing about the contentious posts you see on the NextDoor app and neighborhood Facebook pages. I wanted to lean into humor on that one, but I originally started it during the pandemic so some of the bullets are no longer relevant. That might be worth taking another look at and revising. 

These are just a few things I found on my hard drive, and they don’t include my published work. But there is still plenty of raw material to work with! I encourage you to go through your own files soon and see where you can find some new sources of inspiration. 

Have you unearthed any hidden treasure in your writing files lately? I'd love to hear about it!

Renee Roberson is an award-winning writer who also produces the weekly true crime podcast, Missing in the Carolinas. Learn more about her at FinishedPages.com.

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1 comment Renee Roberson, revision process, works in progress, writing projects

Friday Speak Out!: The Savvy Reader

by Megan Staffel

When I first started to write fiction, I was afraid to read. I didn’t want to pick up a published author’s style. We writers are good mimics and often, I would slide into the voice from whatever novel was my current book. But a life without reading fiction would have been dreary indeed, so luckily, I learned that the bits and pieces of other writers’ work sifting into my work would ultimately be transformed through the multiple revisions that anything I write goes through.

And when I started to teach, one of the things I enjoyed most about working with MFA students was discussing a literary work in class. Together, we would deconstruct a scene to figure out what made it compelling, and I would always learn from my students’ input. When I retired, it was that shared discovery that I most missed. So, now, on my own, when I finish a novel or story, I examine it as though I were preparing it for that class. This practice has turned into a Substack newsletter called, “Page and Story.” I give a brief description of the book or story to entice my readers, and then discuss an aspect of craft that the author does particularly well, showing how it shapes the narrative.

This close examination increases my enjoyment and I believe it helps me as a writer because it widens the possibilities. When I begin to write a new piece of fiction, do I want to start with a long shot as Dominic Smith does in Return to Valletto, situating the town within its landscape as the narrator approaches, or do I want to start with a close up, a view from a character’s interior as Margot Livesey does in the opening to The Road from Belhaven when Lizzie thinks about her visions? Or do I want to begin with a story that appears in a newspaper as in Clare Chambers novel, Small Pleasures? There are endless choices and from the fiction I’ve read I have a sense of how each choice affects the reader’s experience. Paying attention to the craft of a story I’m enjoying is reading like a writer and opening myself to methods that are different from the ones that may have become my default.

In my next posting I’ll discuss Held, a novel by Anne Michaels in which the narrative is episodic and fragmented and the story is not about characters in a particular time and place, but in multiple locations at different time periods. What unifies them is the theme of love. It’s a wholly original approach to narrative and the elasticity and suppleness Michaels gives it is exciting. Held has suggested new tools to consider as I work on my next piece of fiction, but even if I borrow something, my revision process will make it my own. What I’ve learned over these many years is that reading fiction while I’m writing fiction is necessary, helpful, and enriching.

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photo credit Brian Oglesbee

Megan Staffel's new novel, THE CAUSATIVE FACTOR, won the Petrichor Prize at Regal House Publishing and will be published by Regal House in October 2024. She is the author of two recent collections of short fiction, THE EXIT COACH and LESSONS IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE (Four Way Books) and two novels, THE NOTEBOOK OF LOST THINGS (Soho Press) and SHE WANTED SOMETHING ELSE ( North Point Press) and a first collection of short stories, A LENGTH OF WIRE AND OTHER STORIES (Pym-Randall Press). Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals including the New England Review, Ploughshares, The Common, and others. Her stories have been shortlisted in Best American Short Stories and nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Megan taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College as well as at the University of Iowa, Kansas State University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Vermont College. She lives with ceramic artist Graham Marks and has two adult children. She splits her time between Brooklyn, New York and a farm in a small town in western New York State. 

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Would you like to participate in Friday "Speak Out!"? Email your short posts (under 500 words) about women and writing to: marcia[at]wow-womenonwriting[dot]com for consideration. We look forward to hearing from you!
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1 comment craft of writing fiction, fiction writing, Friday Speak Out, Megan Staffel, reading other writers, revision process

Rethinking My Writing Goals

As I considered my goals this year, I thought the most important goal was to get back into a writing groove. I actually surprised myself when I ended up finishing a short story this month.

With February now upon us, I considered my goals for this month and even the remainder of the year. What would I focus on next? I love the idea of writing new stories, but the truth is, I have to face my writing weakness which is always looming and lurking in the corner: revising.

I am certain this isn't the first time I've talked about this weakness of mine. 

In fact, I only even thought of it recently when I was cleaning out my closet and stumbled across an old short story. Looking at this story that was handwritten and nicely folded in an envelope, I thought to myself, "So that's where you went to." 

I have another collection of stories sleeping inside a couple of notebooks, dying to come out and at least be typed.

What's my hesitation?

I'm not sure. It could be that this is the part of writing that really makes me think about the actual story I'm trying to say and less intuitive than the first draft is for me. It also involves getting feedback which is always stressful, even in the best of stories. I can even conquer the 

But I think as I embrace new writing goals, I'll have to accept that I really need to get the fires burning in the revision process of writing. 

What are your writing goals? 

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4 comments Nicole Pyles, revision process

Finding Treasure in Your First Draft

Many of us have heard over the course of our writing life that first drafts are meant to be terrible. Many authors, ones more successful than me, have said that is the key to getting them done. Let them be awful! And that's true. Except sometimes we get stuck so far down on the road of revision we lose sight of some things in the story that was so important before. 

Recently, I've talked about my journey to revise a story that has had a character that felt underdeveloped to me. Nothing felt right in my tweaking, and I decided to go back to earlier drafts. I wondered what happened along the way that I lost so much sight of my story and my character.

In the midst of feedback I had received a couple of years ago, I found comments that were like diamonds in the rough. Many people had said about this earlier version that they liked the characters and the pace of the story. How wonderful to read! And quite the opposite of some recent feedback I received. These previous comments actually just mentioned that my ending felt a bit abrupt and just not enough. 

Keeping this in mind, I looked over the story once again and realized that somehow in the midst of revision I had taken away some of the good aspects of the story in order to make it fit what I thought was a better version. 

The revision process can be a bit like Frankenstein making his monster. You think you are going along a good path, and then you get lost along the way. You remove the wrong thing and keep the things that should have gotten plucked out. 

So, now I go back to that earlier draft. Not quite the sucky first one, but it's likely the fourth or fifth revision I thought wasn't good enough.

If you find yourself stuck along the revision process like me, look back over those earlier versions. Maybe somewhere in there you'll find some treasure and build it back into your newer version. Maybe somehow you can make things right again.

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4 comments Nicole Pyles, revision process

Perseverance Pays Off

Since March, my writing stalled. For months, I couldn't imagine writing a story and barely had any interest in looking at what I had already written. 

Somehow, despite the heat, during the summer, I regained my momentum and took another look at the stories I worked on so hard over the past couple of years. 

I started out by doing a writing inventory. This process helped me become familiar with the stories already completed, what I wanted to do to polish them up, and re-read any half-finished pieces as well. I ended up going back to the drawing board on many stories. This involved doing what I feared the most - rereading my stories. 

To be honest, when I have already started the submission process, I am afraid to go back and re-read a story. Is that weird? I feel like if I reread the story I'm going to notice flaws. Flaws I should have spotted before. Flaws that kept me from getting published. I fear that I will have to accept that I wasted time when I could have spotted these mistakes in the first place. 

Yet, I did just that. I re-read my stories. Revised them. Re-submitted my stories for a new round of critiques. When I polished what I could, I re-submitted. 

I'll be honest, this process feels exhausting. It often leads to many more rejections. It often leads me to feel perplexed about what I'm missing in each story. I wonder sometimes if trying to re-write too many times ruins my stories. 

Then, something happened this past month. I got published. My flash fiction story entitled, "We've Been Here Before," will be published by the Sky Island Journal in their fall issue, released mid-October. 

I never thought I'd get the chance to say that this year about any of my creative work. I got published. 

What I've realized about writing this year is that I no longer fear the revision process. I think I used to because so many times my stories end up being nothing like where they started. In fact, this story that will be published later this year, changed many times. The main character was originally female. I changed the title about four times. It was originally under 500 words (now about 980). Some things did remain, but overall, the story changed. 

Now, I'm open to changing my stories. My writing process and revision process may not be right for you, but it has worked for me. Going back, re-reading, rewriting, and tweaking things here and there has become a familiar writing process for me. I no longer worry about changing the story into something it wasn't when it started out. 

Since March, I've gone back and rewritten and polished up several of the stories which are now back into the submission process. Sometimes my settings change. Many times the endings have changed. There is more to do and many more stories ahead of me to rewrite. There are also many more rejections to get beyond.

If you lost your momentum, I encourage you to pick yourself back up and keep pushing forward. So much of writing requires endurance, a trait that I've learned more about this year than other years in my life. 

Keep writing. Keep rewriting. Keep getting feedback. Keep submitting. Perseverance pays off. 

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7 comments Nicole Pyles, revision process, rewriting