The Discovery of an Unfinished Novel
Just what the world needs?
I think I can call myself a writer.
I have some evidence to back this up.
My handwritten scroll is all over the pages of many notebooks, in the form of journals, poems, song lyrics, short stories along with several attempts at writing a longer work.
I also have a collection of various electronic devices which hold directories with future proof names such as Writing, My Stories and Archive which are stuffed with documents I’ve typed my ideas into.
However, I could never call myself an author.
I don't write professionally.
I've never been paid for anything I’ve written and crucially, I’ve not completed what could be described, fiction or nonfiction, as a book.
My attempts have only got so far.
I once spent two years working on a story set in the highlands of Scotland about an unscrupulous landowner who was importing exotic animals to hunt on his estate.
I got around forty thousand words into that one.
I still have it somewhere but I don’t want to go back into those woods again.
That’s one of the great things about writing (or printing) on paper.
The Permanence.
Making the large assumption that you haven’t lost, mislaid or somehow destroyed it (or someone else hasn’t!), then years, decades or centuries later - it’s quite possibly still where you left it.
And so, I found myself rummaging about in the dim light of the attic, searching box after box for my copy of The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub (two real authors). This quest had been inspired by Stranger Things, which I’d been watching with my eldest son.
In one scene set in a hospital room, The Talisman is being read from and I remembered that I had a copy once and so it must be in the attic?
Eventually, I found it.
In the same box was a blue folder.
Unnamed. No label. Only I knew what it contained?
I rescued both the book and folder from the attic.
The blue folder sat on my desk for quite a few weeks without being opened.
However, I did start thinking about it.
And how I’d never finished the story it contained.
It had a working title of “Morag and Alex” and it was a dystopian quest type adventure story set in a “future Scotland”
I’d printed out most of what I had, which came to around a hundred and fifty pages of A4 paper.
There were also several pages of handwritten notes, corrections in red pen and little drawings and diagrams.
And then I stopped.
There were lots of reasons, I'm sure, though I can't quite remember what they were now.
This was before COVID, so when that all happened it probably didn't help.
Since that time I have attempted other creative projects.
I had a music project during lockdown called Signal Source Unknown, but for some reason I just never turned my attention back to writing.
It's taken me years to realise that I really miss the actual act of writing.
Not just making things up and writing them down.
Or the conversations between characters that are still only figments in one imagination
Or grappling with all the questions about whether the story is worth telling, writing, reading.
There is just something about physically writing things down.
I’d never really thought too much about it before but I’ve come to believe now that writing is good for you!
Lots of people use different types of journaling as part of their daily routine to help with their mental and emotional well being.
Writing an actual book. Is that just taking it too far?
Or can it, for some people, be a missing piece of the jigsaw?
The one that dropped off the table and disappeared into the vacuum.
In my case, quite some time ago.
And so, I’m older now (not younger!) and I’d like to bring some writing back into my life.
One way to do that is to continue with the story in the blue folder.
The one that’s been hidden away at the bottom of a box, frozen in time, in a dark and dusty attic.
Surely there can’t be a downside to this?
And even as I write those words I begin to hear those voices…
“No! Don’t! There are PLENTY of other things to do with your time.”
“Nobody is interested - not even you. There’s enought second rate (or less) writing clogging up the internet without adding to it.”
“It’s a young person's game. No one over the age of [insert number here] should bother with that kind of thing.”
And the chatter continues, but I’ve learned to ignore most of it, at least for now.
I understand that those doubts are normal but also that most of them carry more than a grain of truth.
It would certainly be easier to just quietly put the blue folder back in the attic, in a box full of other people’s writing that I read half a lifetime ago and think or say no more about it.
One day it may well get picked up again, possibly by me, and tossed into the recycle bin without another thought.
I haven’t done that. The folder is still sitting here, quietly waiting.
Wouldn’t it be good to pick up from where I left off and work all the way through to a finished story?
That’s what I’m asking myself.
Or should I just start something shiny and new?
Were there other reasons for stopping work on it?
Did I fall out with Morag?
Perhaps I’d thought that the story wasn’t really going anywhere.
Or that it was going to take me years and years to get to the end.
Even finished and released out into the world, would anyone else ever read it or get something from it?
Everyone must think about this.
So I look at the blue folder and it looks back at me and I wonder about unfinished stories.
