A week ago, I told you I’d reread a unpublished novel manuscript of mine—one I’d stopped marketing years ago after multiple rejections, including one which had it sitting with a certain editor who shall not be named for four years before a decision was made—and saw enough good and true in it that I decided I’d try to revise it up to my 2014 standards.

Having come to that conclusion, the first thing I had to do was digitize the book. Sadly, though every other short story or novel I’d ever attempted, whether completed or not, published or not, existed in electronic form, this one didn’t. Even though I searched through all my files in every format, I never found it. (Was the universe trying to tell me something?) So I spent three days OCR-ing the 378-page manuscript, which turned out to contain nearly 94,000 words.

Then, on Thanksgiving, I sat down and started revising the first chapter, which I continued doing Friday, and yesterday as well. But as I moved forward, attempting to collaborate with last century’s me, I soon realized …

No.

The revisions I’ve done so far quickly showed me that no matter how much work I might put into the book, the result would always be something I’d feel a need to apologize over, to make allowances for, to fight the compulsion to explain that it’s an older work, so please be gentle. I think I’d always feel a sense of embarrassment about presenting as new something not new, as if I were serving dinner guests stale bread or frozen fish. I could see that, even if completely revised, the work would never be more than a clumsy hybrid, useful only as an indicator of what my best had been a long time ago.

I decided that before officially abandoning the book, I wanted to know exactly which era me the story and my execution of it represented. So I pulled out my diaries, which I’ve been keeping on a near-daily basis for 38 years, and skimmed until I found an entry noting the dates on which the project was begun and completed.

Turns out I started the novel on August 2, 1990—24 years ago—and ended it on December 31, 1996—a month shy of 18 years ago. So of course it no longer represents what I think constitutes a story, or how one transforms prose into popetry. Yes, there are passages that still move me, sections that still have power, but those are far outnumbered by parts that make me wince, that embarrass me, that I wish to disown. And even if I could eliminate the latter, whatever remained would still not represent me in the fullness of my current powers. (Such as they are.)

I’ve often heard the phrase that when writing, you must “kill your darlings.” And what that advice is generally taken to mean is that a passage too beautiful or poetic might distract and should therefore sometimes fall in service to the greater story. That’s “kill your darlings” on a micro level, but I think the rule exists on a macro level as well. There are stories we’re so taken with that they get in the way of the further stories we’re meant to write. We become so obsessed with them they block us from moving forward, and we can waste time and talent on a project that can never fully succeed, no matter how much time and effort is applied.

Luckily, it didn’t take me long to realize that this book is one of those projects.

It’s an artifact of a certain place and time, a marker of who I was. Which is all it needs to be. And so let it remain that way. Editing it would be nothing more than an exercise in nostalgia, and to spend any more time massaging it would be pointless, and perhaps damaging.

If I ever bring another novel to market—which would likely only occur by accident, as the short story owns my heart—it should be something that grows naturally out of who I am in that future time, not excavated from the past.

And so—on to something new!

I’ve completed six new short stories so far this year. Can I make it seven?