I admit it, I have a
private graveyard - on my hard drive. It’s where I bury stories I don’t finish.
However, I don’t just do that because I want to treat them well. No, I do it
for some occasional necromancy. I reuse those ideas and I’m not ashamed to admit
it. There’s no reason to be ashamed. I say farewell to them for the moment, but
they may come back eventually. Many things do.
When I wrote my first
novel, Secret Keeper, I
recycled the villain from another story which had never gotten past the first
chapter. Morgan Le Fay became the Morrigan, but most of her character was left
intact. Like this, I could concentrate more on Jane, Steven, and the rest,
which was important - especially looking back, given it’s the beginning of my
longest-running series to date.
Sometimes, I just
think of one or two scenes and try to write a story based on those, but it
doesn’t work. Then I’m working on another book and realize that this scene or
that from my graveyard can be used there and will fit very well. The same goes
for characters or for certain situations which are composed of several scenes.
The point of this is
that my kind of necromancy, of reviving characters or scenes or situations for
another story, is extremely useful. The fact that a character, scene, or
situation didn’t work where you originally put it doesn’t mean that it will
never work. For every ten stories I start, I have realistically finished one or
two in the past, the others all went to the graveyard. That’s a lot of material
I found good at some point, a lot of material I put work into. It would be a
shame to just let it rot.
There’s two lessons
coming out of this, I think.
First of all, if you
don’t finish all stories you start, you are not a failure. I’m pretty sure no
single author out there has finished every story they ever started. We all have
our graveyard, perhaps not on a hard drive, like me, but somewhere. There’s
always stories where your realize at some point that they’re not going anywhere
useful. The only right thing to do in this case is to abandon them and bury
them in the graveyard. One of those days, you can then take a shovel and dig
them out to reuse some parts (and not just for stories about necromancy,
although I’ve finished a collection of novellas about that topic last month and
have the notes for a novel with a similar theme which still needs writing).
The second lesson is
that just because a character, scene, or situation didn’t work out in one
story, that doesn’t mean they’re useless. You’ve found it interesting enough to
invest time in it, so it’s likely to have some uses eventually. It challenged
you or inspired you or both, so you wrote it down to keep it. Using it
eventually is only logical.
I’m rarely going over
the graveyard looking desperately for some kind of idea I can turn into a story.
New ideas have always come easily to me. I’m good with beginnings and can do
middles - my problem are the ends. Finding a new idea on how to start a story
isn’t something which means I need to dig into my graveyard. The middles are
where it usually starts, so I’m looking over my old stories, reread parts of
this one, parts of that one, and wonder what I might be able to do with them.
Then I read something which intrigues me, which feels right for the story I’m
working on, and I think about how it can be incorporated. Eventually, it is
integrated into the story I write. That’s how my kind of necromancy really
works - no rituals with complex ingredients held in a dead language. I speak
two languages well and none of them is dead.
It works the other way
around as well. Sometimes, I’m writing a story I will definitely finish and I
realize that something I planned for it won’t work out. It’s too much, it’s
going in the wrong direction, it’s just not a good fit. That’s what happened
with the casino subplot in “Grey Eminence” when I finally got around to plot it
all out. I love this subplot; I spent a lot of time figuring out the details of
this subplot, because it has logistics attached to it. The problem is that this
subplot takes too much space and time away from other plots which are necessary
for the endgame while not serving the endgame at all. It doesn’t fit with this
one story I’m plotting. Am I never going to use it, therefore? No, I’m already wondering
whether it can be part of the fourth Black Knight Agency novel, whether I can
put it in the Knight Agency novel after “Ignition Rites”, whatever one that
will be, or whether it could become a plot point when I return to the magpies
for “Two for Joy”. Eventually, the casino subplot will see the light of day
again. Until then, I hope it’s cosy in its grave.
Or let me tell you
something about the time when I started writing novels. I wrote the first two
Knight Agency novels, Secret
Keeper and Key Pieces,
in about one and a half months. Okay, they’re not the longest, but that doesn’t
mean they didn’t take time to write. While I was writing “Key Pieces”, I had an
idea about a kidnapping case, but it didn’t fit with the novel I was writing
(which already had a kidnapping, but that was in a different context). It
became a main plot point for the third novel, Crime Pays Sometimes, instead.
That’s how it is sometimes - you have an idea and it doesn’t fit with the story
you have it for, but it works well with another. Necromancy is the only
solution there as well.
I’ve changed my working method a
little while back and there might be less unfinished stories now, but I don’t
believe that. There’s still times when I just have to write something down,
shape it into the beginning of a story, without being sure that I will ever
finish it. There will be new bodies for the graveyard, but perhaps less
frequently. Well, there’s a lot there already, so it’s not as if I don’t have
material. There’s a lot of zombies to raise already.