Have you ever gone back to something that you might have written a decade ago? Something that seemed exciting at the time, but now, with years in between, when you go back to those words, they seem alien, strange, almost unbearable.
Six years ago, I almost finished writing a novel, only the last chapter was pending. It was about a guy recalling his past relationships with women from a jail cell. Doesn’t sound like too bad a plot right?
I found myself reading the manuscript after discovering a hard-drive that hasn’t been touched in three years. It’s survival for almost eight years is almost a miracle. Because I am someone who easily loses things, including useful memories. Honestly, I could not read beyond a paragraph. In fact, that was the reason why I abandoned the project over a decade ago – it was unreadable. The sheer discovery made me seriously question my skills as a writer, but soon, I just went back to being a regular journalist, writing generic mediocre crap, with no time on the sides to write any fiction.
Sometimes, when the mood wasn’t right, my mind would drift into the need to write poems. And on extremely rare occasions, I would get this burst of desire to pen down a short story and most of the times, it would only be half a short story, sometimes just a paragraph and everything would be forgotten.
But then, thanks to the old hard-drive, there has been a discovery of some interesting old short stories, some half-forgotten novels, some terrible, others exciting. I am trying to salvage one, which originally was intended to be a long novel, but it’s silly, so maybe I would curtail it to a novella for personal reading and as some writing practice.