Revitalizing a Story from the Discard Folder
Sometimes, I go digging in my old story discard folder and strike gold! Over the years I’ve been writing, I’ve sometimes set fragmentary stories aside. In many cases, I know what I want to do with the stories, but I just haven’t had time to finish them. For others, I’m still struggling with what I want to do with them.
Every once in a while, though, I see a submissions call and realize I’ve got a perfect partial story sitting in that discard folder. I pull it out, dust it off, and either finish or rewrite what’s there into something that will work for the submissions call. This tends to work best with a themed call, but sometimes it works for a new market looking for a particular type of story, not necessarily on a narrow theme. Those latter can often be better, in the end, because something written for a narrow theme that doesn’t get accepted for that submissions call may be hard to place elsewhere, especially if many other authors wrote on that same theme.
But the times when I’m able to revive a discarded story piece into something that gets accepted for a themed call are always wonderful!
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