What do you recommend I do with all those things I wrote years ago but have never been able to bring myself to show anyone?
I have published a great many pieces in newspapers and magazines. I don't have stuff in attics. Everything is for sale.I wrote in English for the Spanish Daily News in Madrid. The paper was funded by CIA money but I did not know that until years later. My byline: People and Places: News and Notes.
I wrote for the Hilton Hotels Magazine which was then elegant and glamorous. My byline was "The Champagne Life." Sponsors on my pages paid twice the amount as others .
I also wrote in Spanish for "Diario Pueblo" called "La Vida Loca," Circulation was 12 million people/
The Melia Luxury Hotels asked me to write a monthly piece on travel, art, music and culture.This was also in Spanish. "Ella dice" She says.
I wrote book reviews for Stars and Stripes Pacific Edition, under a pseudonym. Count Torre. It received a great deal of fan mail. The brass could not believe the grunts were actually reading my book reviews and then buying the deep stuff I was recommending.
Have courage! Show them!
Some things are not for the eyes of others, but if you never let them see the light of day, you may never realize your potential.
Get them back out. Read through them, see if you can update them or polish them off and go for it. You've nothing to lose.
Take a creative writing course. When it comes to writing a qualified writing instructor is the one to trust...Not friends, not family.
Save them for your biographer.
Review, re-edit and at least put it on a blog. Send the link to anyone you know who will take the time to read it and comment. Don't take the comments at face value. Try rewriting with the ideas in the comments, but in the end, use your judgment about what to say and how to say it.
Publish it on my Blog!
They'll always be there, whether to incorporate as scenes in a deeper novel, or provide inspiration for a new novel.
If you're anything like me, you probably sucked hard back then, and their best use might be as brainstorming tools for the outline of an even better book.
Revise them, then push them out the door.
I don't think it's a coincidence that most book publishers are in New York, and the suicide rate off the Brooklyn Bridge is substantial. In other words, you can't take yourself too seriously. Prepare for horrendous rejections.
Once, my manuscript was not only rejected, but the agency wouldn't even "waste" a whole piece of paper on me. They cut the paper into quarters so they could deny four people with one sheet. The clincher? On the other side was someone else's manuscript! Someone else's dreams were cut into quarters and used to kill other dreams! "Going green" can't justify that one! I keep it with me in my planner, because it's so sad, it's funny.
In general, if you wrote it years ago, let it rest. Some ideas won't allow you abandon them, in which case, you can keep working on them until you're ready to show them around, but for the most part, really old stuff probably isn't relevant anymore. Write something new.
Dust them off. Give them a read. Make some changes. Let others read them. Make more changes. Join a writing group. Make more changes. Put it away again. Then pull it out. If you like it than send it out. Who knows where it will lead.
Do not let those ideas go into oblivion. Otherwise they are considered as pieces of nonsense thrown in a garbage bin of irrelevance. So, generate those ideas into a published work to enable others benefit themselves or use them for references. History would have been void if those who wrote history had not penned them. |
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