This post by Chloe Benjamin originally appeared on The Millions on 7/28/14.
“For every book I publish,” a writing teacher once told me, “there’s one book I don’t.” At the age of eighteen, armed with a truly bad novel and a rather absurd sense of optimism, this line did not exactly resonate. But as I amassed rejection slips of every size—and once my first novel was rejected by a pantheon of New York publishers—I realized that nearly every writer has a novel in a drawer: a manuscript that, due to any number of reasons (rejection, timing, chance, diversion) never quite becomes a fully-formed book.
By the time an author’s debut hits bookstores, it’s very likely been preceded by a string of books that weren’t: doomed half-novels; slivers of inspiration that curled up and went to sleep; baggy short stories that grew into novellas, then stubbornly refused to grow any more. Some become first drafts, but never find the right agent; others find an agent, but not a publisher. In general, Novels in Drawers are an unruly breed, prone to shape-shifting and border-crossing. Some NIDs lie prone for years before being resurrected and, miraculously, finished; others have their characters or ideas recruited to breathe new life into a different manuscript.
What are we to do to with our books that weren’t? How can we learn from them, and when should we let them go? Below, five fiction writers on the story they still haven’t been able to tell.
Click here to read the full post on The Millions.