Some trunk novels really are worth going back to. The trick is identifying the salvageable ones.
The other day I read a post about why you should pull out the manuscript under your bed. It resonated with me, because earlier this year I returned to an old manuscript that had been poking at my brain for a month. It was a book I’d written almost eight years ago, revised a few times, gotten mixed and lukewarm feedback on, and had figured was an idea that just wasn’t ever going to work.
Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
What triggered my desire to return to it, was an out-of-the-blue idea on how to make the premise I loved finally work—a prologue of all things. But it fit this particular book, and when I reread my earlier pages, I realized it had never been as bad as I’d thought. It had just been missing a few key elements.
