I was visited by a spirit from the past.
A friend asked me how to go about writing. As you can guess, the first thing I told him was “write.” Among other things, I also said, “never throw away notes or drafts."
I have every scrap, outline, note or story fragment I’ve ever written that was at least a complete phrase and was intended to be a story or part of one.
I have bookshelves which are mausoleums for ideas that have passed on.
The drawer of my writing desk is jammed with notebooks from as far back as eighth grade and manuscripts as far back as sixth or seventh grade. These ghosts float around my desk and office and like most thumps in the night, I ignore them. The tattered edges of yellowed paper haunting me with their unfinished business.
What good are ghosts?
Well, I’m about to submit a ghost story for publication.
But it didn’t start as a ghost story. It was a “what if…” I had jotted down years ago when imagining a character stopped on a dark desert highway who suddenly finds himself the interloper in a mysterious and possibly dangerous situation. The idea fizzled there, so I shoved it in the drawer of my writing desk.
One sleepless night last month, I cracked that drawer open and rifled through the lost leaves hoping to find something to occupy my restless mind. The desert highway story appeared, took form in my mind and I started writing.
I finished it, edited it, showed it to my writing group and now it's ready to be submitted for publication.
Don’t throw anything away.
Don’t be afraid of your ghosts.
They may have more to say upon a future visitation.