Sophie has been decluttering and learning a lot along the way…
“Never worry about what to do with old material. You always save it. Never know when you’ll need it.”
That’s the first piece of advice that a writing professional ever gave me. She was a literary agent and she had just taken me onto her list. Slightly to the surprise of both of us, I suspect.
Was it good advice? Probably not all bad. I started to follow it at once, anyway. Well, she’d been an editor and a publisher’s reader before she was an agent. She knew what she was talking about, right?
The Gathering of Old Material
To put this in context, I’d been writing since I was four. Writing wasn’t a new idea. It was already part of me. At four you don’t think in terms of career optimisation. And I’d pretty much stuck with that postion through university and out the other side.
By contrast, my mother, who had sold a couple of fairy stories to a magazine and bought a copy of The Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book on the strength of it, knew that talking to an agent was probably a good idea.
Eventually, I had a whole book to sell. I accepted that I knew nothing about the business side of writing fiction. If someone who did gave me advice, I didn’t argue.
And so I’ve saved everything — rejected mss, rejected drafts, sketches, bits of dialogue, ideas for plots, undigested inspiring moments, worlds built for science fiction, whodunnits and romantasy . None of them ever got written. There are even accounts of sodding dreams that might have a story in them, for Heaven’s sake.
My old material is a vast, uncurated ragbag of stuff from unplanted seed to compost-ready discards of books published twenty years ago.
Over a career of 50-60 published books, that’s a lot of paper.
Sorting Out Old Material
The decision to start decluttering this hoard has become urgent and is essentially practical. My study is overflowing. It needs spring cleaning and a coat of paint.
Also, while I’ve been editing the current book, I’ve been falling over loads of print-outs of previous versions. Many were essentially identical.
Woo hoo! Into the bin with them!
But that’s the easy part.
I’ve never been the world’s greatest at filing. There are storage boxes and folders, box files and ring binders full of other stuff that I’ve started and somehow not taken any further. Much goes right back to my twenties, when I was still feeling my way.
And it’s everywhere, all over the house. Whole sections of papers have escaped the study and now lurk under the spare bed and the back of cupboards all over the house. (I’ve learned to keep dusters and rubber gloves to hand, as well as a paper recycling bin.)
LESSON ONE – keep or discard each file as you come across it. There is no room or time for a Think About It Later pile. That’s how I got into this mess in the first place.
What To Discard?
This is so personal. Some time in my twenties I decided to keep a physical copy of every book I completed, until and unless it was published. This was really because friends like to read the unpublished stuff sometimes.
But so far I’ve dipped into three of them and one was truly embarrassing. On top of that, I didn’t like any of the characters. So I binned that particular ms, gettng rid of a truly awful book and releasing a whole box file all in one go. It felt wonderful!
The odds and sods — which can be any length from less than a page to 10,000 words — are fairly simple, too. The only person who will ever want to read them is me. Handwritten or typed would have to be exceptional to make the cut. To make use of those I’d have to retype into digital format. Up to now, I haven’t found any that I could be arsed to do that for! So — no suvivors yet.
I’m more forgiving of those that do have a digital file. They might be useful at some point.
But even so, my basic principle is to discard them unless they contain something that really grabs me.
A great character will do it. Or a fascinating plot twist. Or even a place, a moment in time, an odd juxtposition of detail. It has to be dynamic and it needs to make me want to read more.
Several of these have made the cut. In which case they go into a discrete envelope folder, labelled with the probable genre they were intended for, and dated.
Inside the flap of each envelope folder, I keep a runing list of each item by title, if it has one, or significant detail if it hasn’t.
Sometimes,over the course of time, I manage to marry up connecting pieces, too, which is very pleasing.
LESSON 2 – Once you set up a system of saving and noting the details of stuff you’re going to keep, it becomes pretty clear which pieces are actually worth it. Anything worth all that effort will stand out like a beacon. God bless the Not Worth The Trouble gene.
Old Material You (or Your Readers) Can’t Let Go
It is particularly poignant, not to say painful, when a novel starts with plenty of juice and somehow runs dry.
That is what seems to have happened to Dorothy L Sayers, in her book Thrones, Dominions, which was completed (at the request of the Sayers literary estate, who approached her) by Jill Paton Walsh, and published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1998.
Paton Walsh, already an acclaimed children’s author, had written a couple of well-received detective novels, whose principal character and investigator was Imogen Quy, a nurse at an Oxford college. Paton Walsh herself had studied as an undergraduate at St Anne’s. One sees why the Sayers estate thought she was the right person to complete the book.
It was a Peter Wimsey story, set after Busman’s Honeymoon, and Dorothy L Sayers had written a fair chunk before she abandoned it in, I think, 1935 or 1936.
Her scenes and sketches, as well as the clear intention about the murderer, were among her papers, which Paton Walsh consulted conscientiously.
It seems that Sayers had come to hate the book. Some people conjecture that her feelings had something to do with the then current scandal about the marital problems of Mrs Simpson and the heir to the throne, briefly King Edward VIII. For whatever reason, the book was a ruin.
Ruins unnerve me.
In my case, there was a finished novel which, if not quite a commission, was at least inspired by an editor’s strong advocacy for a particular story line. Suffice it to say that the main plot point involved a baby. I resisted the idea and, when argued to a standstill, fought the story every step of the way as I wrote.
In the end, it made me feel ill just to sit down at the computer and read the bally thing. And yes, I still had a copy in my ghastly non-filing system. WHY did I keep that abomination?
I didn’t just discard that one. I tore up every page into very small pieces and burned rather a lot of them. And danced with delight.
Really hope that Dorothy L Sayers didn’t hate her book as much as that!
That Old Material You Aren’t Done With?
I imagine that every novelist has some story that has walked with them for ages, without ever quite closing in for the coup de grâce. I have three, perhaps four. Every so often something recalls them to me — an image, a phrase, very often a piece of music. And then, for a while, one or more of the characters will come out of the mist again. I will even start to dream about them.
Often I write something new, maybe adding to the existing story material, as a result. Then that turns out to be meaningful and even deeply engaging. Only it just…… doesn’t really go anywhere. Well, not to an ending, anyway.
It’s frustrating. But I know that I have to keep all the rags of those stories safe. Just in case… some day… I find out why. And, if I’m really lucky, where they’re going.
Keep your fingers crossed for me!
Sophie
I don’t have quite your problem, Sophie – I’ve moved four times since I started writing and have had a few goes at decluttering. However I do still have stuff that I started in the 1980s. The beginning of the story that won me a prize in magazine (lunch with a Century editor who suggested Mills and Boon was my metier). A whole file of ideas I haven’t looked at in years. The beginning of a story that I envisaged as a series set around a single town with interlocking characters that came grinding to a halt when an editor insisted my first hero be an Earl and killed it stone dead. But the advice to hold on is sound. I knew I’d written the first few pages of Murder Among the Roses a good while ago. The file is still there and it’s dated 23 August 1997.
I must say that looking at some of the ideas has excited me, Liz. But I haven’t found a jewel like the start of Murder Among the Roses. What a joy to have has it waiting for you. A really lovely book!
Oh, golly, this resonates. When I downsized from 3-bed house to tiny flat, I had to be ruthless with my writing detritus. All the original print outs went, along with their bible notes. Swathes of research files, endless letters. I got trigger happy in the end. Nevertheless, I couldn’t bring myself to throw out my early unpublished tomes. I kept scrappy potential story notes. Fortunately not a lot of those.
Recently, sorting the leftover storage, I had another purge. And finally am embarking on another as I still need to sort what came back from storage.
And don’t even start on copies of books! Foreign translations still abound though I’ve offloaded some. Sent signed early books to current fans recently, so that helped. But still have copies spilling out of the bookcase. Yikes. It’ll all have to go. Like you, I find it cleansing and therapeutic to ditch the stuff. Even if it’s a wrench sometimes.
Good luck indeed!
Oh, I do feel for you about old copies of our books, especially those foreign translations. My recycling bookshop did say they would take books that were not saleable, even if they were out of date, because they had a wholesaler who would pay for them, presumably to be used as ballast or something. So I filter in a couple of unsaleables from under the spare bed every time I take along a clutch of shelf-clearing books to Oxfam. It will take a long time to clear the backlog, however.
I have stacks of spiral-bound A4 notebooks recording all kinds of writing — snatches of dialogue, drafts of whole scenes and snippets, ideas for stories, lists of questions I’ve asked my characters at different stages in a book and their responses. It’s so daunting to have to go through them because I tell myself there’s gold in them thar notebooks, as well as loads of dross.
So I raise my glass to you, Sophie, for tackling the piles. And one day, maybe I’ll stick my courage to the sticking point and tackle mine.
Oh yes, it’s those notebooks that are the hardest to part with. I haven’t even dared to look at any of them yet. I’m still dealing with free-flying sheets of paper!
Thanks for the encouragement. So far there’s been more catharsis than tears. Of course, like Liz Bailey, I may just have got trigger happy. But, oh the relief when another pile of papers disappears from the study floor and I see the [remarkably celan and bright] carpet again.
I recently had a purge in my office but it was largely a matter of hiding stuff in drawers and cupboards rather than actually chucking stuff. Coward, moi? However, as I’ve now revised and republished all my Mills & Boon backlist in both ebook and print — you can see them all at https://Books2Read.com/JoannaMaitland — I no longer have any need for all the old print copies of my M&B titles that are lurking in cupboards round the house.
I remember reading somewhere that old M&B paperbacks were used as the base layer for building a motorway. I haven’t got quite that many, but there might be enough to line a small path…
Many congratulations on publishing all your Mills & Boon backlist., Joanna. What an achievement.
And now you can release at least some of those physical copies into the wild without worrying that you’ll lose something crucial. Win Win, I’d say!
Thank you Sophie for inspiring me to get on with this. Shan’t release into the wild. Not exactly. I fear they’re for the recycling bin…