Treasures from the Sock Drawer

Like all writers, I have a lot of ideas for stories. When one of them occurs to me, I try first to figure out whether it's marketable, and if I think it is I go ahead and write the story. If the idea seems a little anemic, I store it away until I can (1) develop it into something better or (2) combine it with another idea. Several stories that I've written lately have come from this second approach.

Most ideas seem to appear to me from thin air, but sometimes I see a call for a short-story anthology whose theme kicks off an idea that might not have happened otherwise. (Barb Goffman's Crime Travel was one of those, and Michael Bracken's Jukes & Tonks, and a couple of Josh Pachter's music-themed anthologies.) At other times--not often--I go back to ideas that I had and stories that I wrote many years ago, stories that I felt weren't strong enough to submit. And whenever I dig those manuscripts out from under the bed or from the back of my sock drawer and look at them I usually realize how good a decision it was to hide those stories from any chance of public view. Most of them were terrible, and serve to remind me of just how little I knew when I first started trying to write short fiction.

But now and then I find that some of those old stories can be repaired and made presentable, and when that happens it's like finding a silver dollar on the sidewalk, or a free gift among all the bills in your mailbox, or a pair of clean underwear in your dorm room in college. In other words, a pleasant surprise. And the rewriting of some of those old manuscripts can actually be enjoyable.

Most of my favorite stories have been written fast: I get an idea, think about it a while, write the story, edit it, and send it off to a market. But a few of my favorite published stories didn't start out as a blinding bolt from the blue; they came from unearthing those aforementioned old stories and trying to breathe new life into them. One of those was "Molly's Plan," a dot-matrix-printed manuscript about a bank heist that I found hidden not in my sock drawer but in a cardboard box on the bottom shelf of a closet in one of our back bedrooms. I took it out, dusted it off, worked on it for a week or two, and sent it to Strand Magazine in the spring of 2014. It wound up getting published there, went on to be selected for Best American Mystery Stories the following year, and has since been reprinted overseas, considered for film, and chosen for inclusion in the permanent digital archives of the New York Public Library. Another was "Calculus I," an unsubmitted and forgotten story I'd written in the mid-'90s about two engineering students' plan to cheat on a college exam. I found the manuscript, rewrote and retitled it, and sold it in 2019 to the print edition of The Saturday Evening Post and later to a foreign publisher. I usually judge the worth of my stories by how much fun they were to write, and I had a great time writing (in this case, rewriting) both of those. And I almost missed them completely.

A few weeks ago I found several more of those old unsubmitted manuscripts in the back of one of my file cabinets (I'm not the most organized person in the world), and while two or three of those stories look promising, the others are probably too weak to ever grow into anything more. I won't throw them away--I never throw away anything I've started writing--but if I use them at all it might be to try to salvage some parts and pieces from them to insert into something more current.

Okay, question time. Have any of you writers discovered older stories in your files that you later reworked and marketed? Any success with those? Do you have other projects (teaching moments?) that you gave up on and will probably never revive? Do any of you save your story ideas for later use? How and where do you save them? In your head? In a Word file? In the "notes" app on your phone? Do your story ideas usually come in a burst of heavenly light, or do they seep in during deep thought, or come from "prompts" like anthology submission calls or themed issues of a magazine? Please let me know, in the comments.

As for my situation, I have re-filed several of those old manustcripts that I recently found--this time I put them in a folder called "in progress" (a hopeful label if ever I heard one)--and I'm actively reworking the others. If I'm lucky you'll soon see those somewhere in a publication. And meanwhile, I'm trying to stay alert to any new ideas that happen to come along.

One last observation: They can be quick as rabbits, these story ideas, and if you're not careful they show up and then scurry off into the bushes before you can grab them and hold on. Especially those that appear in the middle of the night. But when you do catch one, and when it turns out to be something you can develop into a story you're proud of . . . well, that makes all this worthwhile.

Good hunting, to all of us.