I get Writer’s Digest emails in my inbox and this morning’s linked to an article, “The Unseen Grief of Shelved Projects (And What to Do About It).” It discusses the grief writers feel when they have to give up on a project or otherwise left a written work behind and locked it away.

Creative projects take up emotional space. Writers spend weeks, months, or years building characters, shaping scenes, and imagining futures for their stories. Even when a project is unfinished, the attachment remains.

Writers may feel:

• Guilt for not finishing
• Frustration over lost momentum
• Shame about unfinished work
• Sadness about leaving characters behind
• Fear that the idea was never good enough
• Fear that the next idea won’t be good enough either

Sometimes the grief is not really about the manuscript at all. It is about the season of life it is associated with.

An old draft can become emotional archaeology, preserving pieces of who the writer was at that time.

I thought about my shelved projects. At first, I didn’t think I had any–The Name and the Key was the closest one to being shelved until I rewrote it and got a contract for it. But then, I really thought about it, and in my Master Writing File, I found a few projects:

• The reworked version of my musical Melancholia with new songs and a different ending (except I never quite got that far, and the software for my music got discontinued and the music files are missing–they didn’t transfer correctly to my new PC so I’d have to rewrite all the music from memory)
  
• A young adult novel called Stolen Fruit which was inspired by the Hades and Persephone myth–it was really popular in the workshops at Seton Hill but there was a huge influx of Hades and Persephone retellings in publishing that I thought the book would never get picked up, so I stopped writing it
  
• A more mature novel–probably NA–called The Clockwork Prince about a dead body that gets reanimated as an automaton with alchemy. All the alchemy went into The Darkening Gate trilogy and I don’t know if readers are cool with me revisiting a similar magic system in a different work.

How do I feel about shelving these? I think out of all of them, I feel the most guilt towards Stolen Fruit because it was well received and had an absolutely brilliant idea to it that I won’t share here…just trust me that the twist was good. It had a lot of potential and was fun to write, too. Maybe, if my Tokyo Ghoul gourmet-inspired work (that may or may not be standalone) doesn’t work out, I could revisit Stolen Fruit.

Melancholia had some beautiful brand-new songs written for it, but I wouldn’t commit to it again without knowing that at least one my local theaters (there are three of them) would be willing to put it on. It debuted twenty years ago, so it’s not like anyone would remember it. But, I don’t think this will work out again like it did back in 2006. There was some real magic with that cast and crew that I don’t know could be duplicated.

The Clockwork Prince was the least developed out of all of my projects. To be honest, all I really had for it was a character concept (the titular Prince), so he may or may not be used in a future, different work.

All I know is that I’ve tried to save everything I’ve ever written just in case it reappears somewhere. I don’t like giving up on work with great potential, but for one reason or another, all of these projects stalled.

Will I be able to revive them? Who knows. But it is absolutely true I feel some grief over the loss of them.

Here’s what the article recommends for dealing with said grief:

• Give the project a proper goodbye
• Organize old projects so they stay accesible
• Create a “treasure chest” folder
• Bring a shelved project back to life
• Revisit the draft like a stranger

The article actually goes into more detail with the bulletin points I provided above, so I highly recommend you check it out for some solid advice. To my surprise, some of it I’ve already been doing, which is a good sign!

I genuinely wonder if someday I can go back and write the novels I’ve shelved (my goal is trilogy/series right now because they’re more successful and my publisher is snatching them up). I hope someday I can, and they have a home besides a file on my computer.