My gorgeous daughter, Hazel, moved back into our spare room last week. As Shelley and I don’t live in the largest of houses, this meant a weekend of clear outs, cupboard re-organisation and large bags of old clothes sent off the Salvation Army.
But, joy of joys, pulling down that dusty old box on top of the laundry cupboard turned out to be much more fun than the ensuing sneezing, allergy and asthma attack would suggest. Inside, I discovered folder after folder of old writings dating back to my university days.
In amongst the assignments and thesis notes were pads filled with half-finished short stories, forgotten radio scripts, scribbled ideas and other various random jottings. These were not the finished short stories and other writings we keep in our portfolios and albums – but the discarded jetsam of the ones that didn’t quite make it.
Interspersed with a hundred on-hold doodles and pages where I obviously tried to catalogue my VHS collection, were random pages with maybe two lines of an idea on each. Another page reveals a complete logline and premise for a television series. Another three pages form the breakdown of a novel before veering off into a list of jobs I applied for that month. (“Terry. Call back next month. May have work available”)
Most of these I barely remember and some I could swear I’ve never seen before – if it weren’t for my unmistakable handwriting. Such is my memory.
All those ideas – each a potential modern classic – would otherwise have been forgotten and lost to the recycle bin of history if I hadn’t also been a terrible hoarder as well as a budding writer.
Well, maybe not a modern classic. Flicking through, there is plenty of cringe-worthy material. A lot of these writings were from my late teen period when I was convinced of my own writing genius without the experience to actually back it up.
But that’s not the point.
All of those ideas! Some of the concepts weren’t bad, even if I didn’t manage to pull them off back then.
I have a folder on my hard drive for random ideas as they occur – lots of word docs with a couple of sentences, categorised as ‘Possible blog posts’, ‘Script ideas’, ‘The great novel’ and so on. So it was exciting to discover I was similarly obsessed with recording my ideas even in my pre-digital days. I never realised I kept so much!
Some of it’s even typed! Pages of draft script kept neat in a plastic sleeve before disappearing into a box to be left unfinished and unremembered.
What is great about rediscovering forgotten ideas is that they can inspire all over again. Looking at them with a fresh eye and two decades of extra experience, it’s like striking a rich seam of imagination I didn’t know was just under the surface.
A couple of the short stories already have complete first drafts, just waiting for me to pick up and hone into shape. Excise the youthful enthusiasm. Bury the ridiculous exposition. Modernise. Reduce the cringe.
More likely, one of these jottings will spark fresh thoughts leading to completely new writing with but an echo of the previous idea. What I was interested in back then is different now. My outlook has changed. What I would have chosen as a central theme would not necessarily apply anymore. Yet, even if out of the whole exercise I only end up with the germ of a new idea, having rejected or chipped away at everything else, it will be worth it.
Never throw out an idea, no matter how silly. Jot it down. Keep it safe. Some day, you might be glad you stumble across it again.