Discover the Forgotten Treasures in Your Creative Cellar
How many unfinished creative writing projects do you have lurking in your cellar? Your first story? A notebook full of ideas from the writing residential you attended three years ago but fell out with one of your classmates, so you dare not look back there?
If you’ve finished one story, I bet you have a store because the imagination is like a weed in its ability to spread all on its own, come sun or shade. Once you’ve opened that creative door, it is hard to shut; I imagine, I’ve never tried.
So if you’ve been writing for a few years; attended more than one kind of class or workshop then I bet you’ve got a stock of half baked stories and ideas lurking around in your memory, desk drawer or hard drive.
Before I share my 6-step process for excavating the magic from your lost stories and getting them moving again here’s a little anecdote about a writer, we all know a lot about already.
Oh no, not another Stephen King writing analogy! Yes, I’m afraid so, but this one conveys how easy it is to discard goldmine ideas, and it’s not about craft.
It’s about Carrie, his first published novel. After his initial spark of inspiration for the story, he wrote a three-page first draft and promptly threw it in the bin, deciding he didn’t like it. It wasn’t worth…
