Saving Old Stories by Bonnie Hobbs

          A rough draft of a “new” novel is finished. It must sit a while before the rewriting begins. So, maybe now is a good time to clean off that ‘behind the door’ bookshelf’s dark and mysterious place. The place way at the bottom behind the table covered with a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle that will lie unfinished for, well, who knows?

          Folders are pulled out, dust wiped away and…what’s this? 

Stories. 

Outlines of stories. Written in a handwriting that looks familiar. Ah, yes, it’s my handwriting, only legible, not like today’s handwriting that scrawls all over first drafts to the point I can’t quite read what I meant and hope I remember, and if I don’t? Well, then I guess the change wasn’t so necessary after all.

          But back to this bookshelf and its mysteries: some of the outlines are actually typed. But truly typed. Not on a keyboard attached to a magical screen that can perform all kinds of magic tricks. No. A typewriter! All these words have been saved. Ideas I didn’t know I had, yet…I recognize a few as being part of a now published novel. Words I wrote and put aside and didn’t think of again until the deep part of my brain must have recalled them.

          I sit on the floor, (no easy feat) and spread all the folders and their contents around me. Sticky notes that are way past sticky flutter like moths when I lift a notebook. One says, “Texas. Ghosts, death, love and redemption.” There’s an idea I didn’t know I ever had. (or maybe never should have had) Sounds more like a biography of my grandma than a Historical Romance.

          Yet the more I paw through it all, the more ideas are seeming do-able. I realize now that I likely wrote most of this down when I wanted to write, craved the time and quiet to write. I knew that someday the two small kids would grow up and I might retire from the full-time job and I would use these ideas.

          Well, that time has definitely come. But the ideas that seemed to pour out of me back then just don’t any more. I struggle for new plots, new characters. I have educated myself about writing, gone to conventions, entered contests, was a finalist in a few and read countless books about plotting and characterization and the use of dialogue. I have done all that. I have been published, I have an agent. But the ideas that lie all over the floor around me now seem to have come from someone else. I’m going to read them all and chuckle about some and use others, or maybe even parts of others.

          Some, I’m going to discard. It’s definitely past time to give some a decent burial. Keeping them, even hidden from myself, has been a good idea, now that I’ve found them. I’m thankful I didn’t throw them away. Using them may or may not be a good idea. I’ll have to wait and see how it works out.

          Oh, but first I have a rough draft to polish (likely about three times) before I take a closer look at that complete outline of “Texas: ghosts, love, death and redemption.”

About Bonnie: 

Bonnie Hobbs grew up in California’s rural central coast, earning degrees in Women’s Studies, Society and Justice, and nursing. She began her nursing career caring for birthing women and ending it caring for hospice patients. 

Drawing from her father’s passion for history and her mother’s love of romantic mysteries, she writes about struggle and triumph, love and loss in the lives of women of the American frontier: Native women, European and Asian immigrants and the daughters of immigrants, Black women enslaved and free, women lured or bullied as well as inspired to move on, always westward. 

She shares a home in southern Oregon with her husband. Their blended family of five grown children have given them fourteen grandchildren, the newest baby boy born in March.