In a post on Writer Unboxed, Kristan Hoffman recommends that we honor our dead stories. “Whether big or small, we all have a graveyard of failed work,” she says. “The novels we got 10K words into, and then just lost steam on. The seeds of ideas that simply never managed to grow into anything more.”
Some stories die because we don’t finish them quickly enough and our ideas become dated. Others we murder when we realize we’re not the right writer for the story. The most painful deaths are death by rejection, when a story we finish and love can’t find a place to thrive.
Those all suck, but Hoffman says your story graveyard is actually a good thing. “Death is a natural and inevitable part of life,” she says. “Similarly, the work that we do is never wasted, for it can always beget something new, and probably better.” We can always go back and dissect old stories for salvageable parts.
Story graveyard also show that you have more than one idea. “Whether it houses a lone tombstone or dozens, your cemetery is proof that you are writing,” Hoffman writes. “That you can continue to work, to imagine, to feel inspired, in spite of hardships and sorrow. So the graveyard is not something to fear. It’s something to honor.”
