Saying Farewell and Keeping a Graveyard

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.