On Giving New Life to Old Story Ideas

I didn’t open the red pocket-sized notebook to check its contents before agreeing to my toddler’s insistence that it should be his new toy. Once he slipped off the elastic band holding it closed and started shuffling through the upside-down pages, I recognized the chaotic scrawling handwriting of notes for some past job. There probably wasn’t anything worth keeping in there.

Aside from a lack of pictures, my toddler sees no difference between my notebook and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It is my solemn duty to read aloud whatever book he hands me.

This notebook contains thrilling stories like my measurements for when I ordered my wedding dress from Northern Ireland in 2020, a to-do list that begins with “clean up dead mouse,” and three pages of phone numbers.

There are careful notes from the lectures I attended at a writing conference several years ago. Addresses and notes from the agonizing experience of house-hunting in Indiana during the pandemic. Doodled maps of the city districts I created for Project Thieves. A line from someone else’s novel that gave me chills.

A reminder for my husband to buy boot laces. Interview quotes from when I wrote an article about an outdoor paintball field and drove a tank. A note that says I was born around 12:30 p.m.

Story notes for many unfinished stories.

My toddler grew bored and spiked the notebook over the baby gate at the top of the stairs. It bounced down toward the kitchen trash can, pages fluttering like a startled pigeon’s wings before crashing into a cabinet. While he ambled off to the window, I thought about those unfinished stories.

There are so many.

My first awful attempt at writing a science fiction novel when I was in middle school. My second, less terrible attempt at a different science fiction novel when I was in high school. A handful of beginnings that ran out of steam after a few pages. Characters for literary roleplays with other writers that tapered off into stagnant silence.

I saved them all.

With a little time, I hoped, I’d think of a way to make even my worst ideas good enough to be worth finishing, sharing, reading. They might be awful, but they were fun to come up with.

Shouldn’t they be fun to play with?

My first novel is horrible yet precious to me. It oozes with all the confidence and cringe of a thirteen year-old writing what they wanted to read. The thought of getting rid of it is as painful as every attempt I made to fix it. But after reading a few isekai comics about readers trapped in the world of someone else’s novel, I started to wonder. I imagined a mature writer dropped in the broken, shallow world of their first draft, taking on the role of a new villain for its insufferable hero.

The more I sit with it, the more I itch to follow the threads to see where they go. To refine those beginnings into standalone moments. To take what was enjoyable in my second novel—the battles between aliens in mecha suits, the tangible realm of mind-melded memories—and break them into a serial with no room for distractions.

To make the old ideas good enough to throw into the world, to see them flutter and flop before they land. All for the fun of it.