What To Do With Unpublished Work

I’ve published four novels, with a 5^th out soon.  However, I’ve written double that in terms of actual material.  As a writer, it makes me itchy to have stuff out there that is probably never going to see the light of day.  However, it’s also a recognition that not everything is publishable if one wants to maintain any kind of reputation for quality.

I first encountered this phenomenon decades ago while reading the tenth anniversary book for Calvin & Hobbes.  The cartoonist, Bill Watterson, talked about ripping up weeks’ worth of material to maintain quality, and I remember thinking that that was crazy, because I wanted all the Calvin & Hobbes I could get my hands on.

Of course, now I know better.  It’s hard while writing to really know if what you’re writing is any good.  In fact, it’s hard to know right after you’re done writing if what you’ve written is any good.  You really need to put it away and let it cool down before looking at it again.  Only then might you know if it meets the quality mark.  I thought at least two of my published novels were shit when I was first done with them, but they looked fine when I went back over them.  Unfortunately, not everything I’ve written has aged as well.

The sequel to Akeldama comes to mind.  It took me four months to write(at least…I can’t remember exactly, but that sounds about right).  I had doubts at the time, but I figured it’d be fine once I was further removed from the process.  Wrongo!  Reading it now, it makes me want to cringe.  It’s a bad novel, and while elements of it are okay, they don’t fit, so I’ll be going back to the drawing board completely for the sequel.

Every so often, I’ll write something I think it great that later turns out to suck.  On Freedom’s Wings, my very first novel, is now so cringeworthy that I wonder why I ever put it on paper.  In retrospect, it’s even worse – I should’ve been able to see I was creating a Star Trek knock-off that people would laugh at(myself included).  Just another point to let things cool down(as I need to remember with the new project I’m working on).

So these novels are just sitting there doing…nothing.  I think a couple of them have potential if I rewrite them, so they may see the light of day later on(much later on).  And although it’s hard, it means I need to not get too attached to my work, because then having to abandon, or seriously rework, a novel is less painful.  As silly as that sounds, every writer experiences that when they have work that turns out to not be their best.