A Writer’s Biography, Volume 2, Part 10: The Ghosts of Writing Projects Past

Prose Night at the Writing Life, 9 November 2024

[These are a lot of headlines lol]

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: For new visitors or subscribers to this Substack, this Prose Night entry is another in a continuing series I have been writing ever since beginning to blog on WordPress several years previously, which I’ve called A Writer’s Biography. These essays have been looks back at my life through the lens of writing and my experiences of writing. My original intent is to try and provide some advice or inspiration to writers in similar situations to myself, although I realize this project has turned into something resembling a memoir (which I haven’t started to tackle as an actual serious project).

I’ve separated these into three “volumes:” Volume I, detailing my early childhood and first experiences with reading and writing; Volume II, detailing my experiences with writing as a young man and during the “quiet times” of my writing, and Volume III, where I discuss how things are in middle age and resuming my life as a writer. Since this story covers some projects and times when I was not an active of a writer, or at least a lot more inconsistent, I decided to make this a Volume II story. All you paid subscribers can check out all the Writer’s Biography posts in my archives.]

And if you can’t spare cash for a subscription, you might give this a shot if you want to support my site on an at-will basis.

Buy Me a Coffee – Venmo

I wonder what Stephen King’s morgue looks like.

This probably requires a bit of explanation, since I think just made up a term¹. ut in the very perfunctory research I did on a small portion of the interwebs, my instinct is I’ve repurposed an old one.

The common word for what I’m thinking of is what are called trunk stories. As in, you stash them in a trunk, not likely ever to be looked at again². However, I decided to use a term from my previous life as a journalist.

Of course, everyone has heard the term morgue used before to describe a place to store bodies. But in the old time newspaper business, a morgue is the place where a newspaper kept news clippings from old stories, usually from its own publication but sometimes from others, especially for important stories of nationwide, statewide, and especially local importance. These were usually organized in microfilm storage if a newspaper was very sophisticated, or it might have simply been a group of filing cabinets holding manila folders of cut-out newsprint stories, photocopies of the same, or some combination of the time. Some of them were organized according to their publication date, or more often by subject matter.

Usually, this area was used by reporters to gather background information on their stories. It was a fast way of finding this information, especially in the pre-Internet era when not every newspaper archive was digitized and itemized.

In some cases, there was such a thing as a digital morgue, a location where past stories could be indexed and referred to in new reporting. Sometimes, a morgue could also refer to a place where you put stories intended for future use. One important circumstance was when you composed a story to be run in the event someone famous dies, such as big time political leaders or entertainers.

From my perspective, I like the idea of an old morgue of half-started stories and ideas from my past experiences. For me, I have both a physical and digital morgue, or perhaps a hybrid one.

Most of the physical representations of my work are tucked into not a trunk or trunks but (appropriate for the 21st century) some plastic totes in my storage building. I haven’t had the chance to look at those yet. Those include some of my writing from even my high school years, stuff I haven’t seen in a decade or so.

My electronic morgue, however, has some writing of a somewhat more recent nature. This included several pieces of writing which I started and stopped over the course of at least one or two decades.

Those were the fallow years, when I plied my trade as first a journalist and then as a teacher but I went years without even sitting in front of a desktop or laptop on my own volition without being paid, without having anything to do with telling a community what happened at its latest city council meeting or teaching a kid how to write with some semblance of skill. Sure, I called myself a writer. But I went years in those days without writing a word.

However, over the course of several years, I’ve had the chance to write more nonfiction essays online and fiction. I got serious about my writing in 2010 or so when I started realizing I wasn’t getting any younger and I wasn’t interested in wasting more time on personal activities (gaming, distractions, etc.) that weren’t adding anything to my existence. Now, this was a long process, but within a few years I felt like I wasn’t fooling myself when I called myself a writer³.

This process was helped by finally having a book I had been contemplating for nearly a decade published around 2019 and then moving on to the first book in a series in 2023. But in the years in between thinking about being a writer and actually kicking myself in the tail to write… there was a lot of false starts and stillborn projects.

This week, with the recent unpleasantness, I was tempted to look back on some of my past work. Back years ago, I was of the opinion politics was a fun form of entertainment, and some (but not all) of my fiction experiments took place in the political world. By 2016, however, politics ceased being fun for me and merely became a duty whenever the elections came around.

Oh brothers, sisters, and all the good people in between, you would not believe the fairy tales I started and abandoned in the 20 years since I’m writing this blog today.

There was a novel about a third party candidate for president in the years before I realized our current presidential election process never let third party candidates win, just due to the structure of the American election system.

There was a story about a double agent for the Chinese government I wouldn’t even know what to do with.

There were two full novels I wrote in my twenties – one I tried to sell unsuccessfully and wouldn’t try to sell again (or would I say just screw it and publish it online for the heck of it?) and the other I wrote for National Novel Writers Month back in the days it was a reputable organization but I’m not sure there is a salvageable novel there.

Then there was a novel based… sort of based in the home of my youth, something of a murder mystery (a half-baked one) based around the idea of gradual regional environmental collapse. I have often joked about me not being much of an Iowa writer other than my poetry, but this story was set right in the heart of what was my home. I took a look at the synopsis I’d written and the dozen pages I’d put together… and it’s not horrific? It might be salvageable, whenever I get around to picking over what is there? Why not – I think the environmental theme might be especially prescient given the current status of my home state.

There are at least two or three attempts at a novel coming from my observations of the American political scene in recent years and re imagining a reaction to this scene from a very dark place from my subconsciousness. All this got abandoned over the past several years, in starts and stops, in some cases well before the recent unpleasantness. And I know I don’t want to tackle the issue in exactly the same way.

So, I took a look at those scraps of writings… and I thought of another novel, one I had read in college, Parable of the Sower, which made me a lifelong fan of Octavia Butler (one of the titans of 20th century sci-fi writers, right along with Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, and Herbert – and I’ll jump up on a table and argue it to anyone who doesn’t recognize her).

I thought of how one idea might change everything in society, and how it seemed unrealistic and relevant all at once, and it might be something true to how my mother Suzanne raised me to believe in humanity. And now I’m staring at the screen and looking at the name of a totally new project with a brand new title, and the ideas are starting to bubble up.

The moral of the story, people, is never throw away art. You never know what it will lead to.

On that note, I would love to take a look through Stephen King’s writing morgue. I bet he has a lot of great ideas I could use (crediting him, of course. He’s still the King, as always).

Prose Night on the Writing Life, 15 September 2024: A sneak peek at The Yank Striker 2

Prose Night at the Writing Life, 10 August 2024: On data and writing

For a good portion of my writing life, I was flailing around without having much of a clue as to how well or how efficiently I was writing. In my head, it’s probably one of the reasons why I spent several years not writing anything and wondering why I didn’t feel like I was much of a writer even though I spent well over a decade writing as a journalist and taught writing, on and off, for nearly as much time¹. Eventually, as all of the self-help books and advice would lay out, I began to think setting some manner of goals would help me be productive as a writer.

My intent in sharing my experience with writing and data is not to give you, the reader, a foolproof system of being a prolific writer. If any writing teacher or coach should tell you, a lifetime is not enough time to learn everything there is to know about writing. Goodness knows there is plenty I don’t know, especially about promotion and reaching an audience. However, there are some things that have worked for me, so I decided to share them for this edition of Prose Night.

Starting Out

Years back, far earlier in time than I want to recount here, I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), well before the current unpleasantness regarding inappropriate behavior between (I’m trying to recall) volunteers for the organization and underage participants.

Regardless, even though I only completed the monthly novel writing challenge once, it was a great influence on my thinking. Part of it was a matter of math. I knew if an author managed to write 1,667 words per day, they would be able to create a 50,000 page manuscript by the end of the 30-day period of November when NaNoWriMo took place.

After a while, I began to wonder if there was a more sustainable pace I could maintain over time. 1,667 words a day is a bit of a haul, especially when you’re someone like me who has a day job and maybe even kids to help look after. Eventually, I decided to set a quota of 500 words a day. It was less than a third of the pace of NaNoWriMo, but it was a pace I thought I could possibly sustain day in and day out. That’s where it began.

Refining the System

Over the course of a couple years, I began to refine how I kept track of what I wrote. I started out just writing down how many words I wrote down every day. I started to put those notes in one place.

Eventually, I got the idea that I had to count the amount of time I spent revising my work and planning what I was going to write, because that was writing as well even though it didn’t necessarily produce large quantities of words. After some consultations with fellow writers in the writing groups I frequented, I came to the conclusion that 30 minutes of revising and planning would be worth as much as 500 words in a day. Those became my minimum quotas for work every day, around about 2017, and I’ve stuck to them ever since.

By late 2017, I was starting to keep track of the numbers on a week to week and month to month basis. I recorded how much work I did each day, week, month, and eventually year. Eventually, you tend to start recognizing patterns, highs and lulls in your productivity, things you can work on. If you’ve had three weeks in a row where you haven’t written much of anything, that’s about the time to pick things up again.

By 2021, I had gathered enough data on what I’d written over the past few years to confidently predict I could write 200,000 words based on my past productivity. So the next year, I shot for 200,000 words and not only made it, but set new yearly records in 2022 and 2023. Nowadays, 200,000 words is the minimum amount of words I am expecting to write. Hopefully, it will be a lot more.

Summing Up

Again, I do not seek to say I’ve solved writing by any means. However, I have learned keeping track of these statistics can be an effective way to measure what I do and show what I might be capable of.

My advice is simple:

Set clear, measurable goals for what you plan to write. These can be any level or amount of writing you feel best fits your capabilities and work habits. However, they have to be things you can put a number and a time limit to.
Keep a record of what you write and when you write it. I also recommend you keep track of how often you meet the goals you set. If you are having trouble meeting those goals, it’s likely something will need to be adjusted.
Review the data you record. Are you having trouble getting writing done on the weekends, or during a certain time of the year? After your review, think about it and see if you need to make changes to things like when or where you write, or whether you need to alter your working habits.
Finally, if the data is showing you’re doing something well and productive, keep doing it.

Happy writing.

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Since I’ve converted to special education teaching, I wouldn’t consider myself to be a writing teacher, even though I do technically help students with their writing as part of their individual education plans (IEPs). What I do there is more specialized and aimed at basic skills rather than the type of teaching you might get in a composition course or writers’ workshop. ↩︎