Occasionally, you’ll write a story that’s just too flawed to easily fix, whether because
of unrelatable characters, an unbelievable premise, or an unreadable writing style.
If you write something you realize is completely unpublishable and beyond revision, it could
end up stored away at the bottom of your trunk to collect dust.
Trunk stories, as defined by author Alex Acks, “are stories you know aren’t good.
Stories that don’t quite work and you can’t seem to fix.
Stories you no longer believe in.
Stories that taught you something valuable about the writing process but have no outer
redeeming value.”
I’ve already written my fair share of trunk stories, and I know I’ll write more.
One of my early short stories was about a short-tempered chef who runs a restaurant
that sells burgers made from lab-created meat.
I wrote it for the Sapiens Plurum annual short fiction contest, which challenges writers
to imagine how humans might create a more desirable future.
I lost the contest, but I received a lot of positive feedback about the story’s professional
prose, and I was proud of the strong first-person voice.
After that first rejection, I decided to expand my 3,000-word story into a 6,000-word story.
But no matter what I did, it just didn’t work.
The conflict felt contrived, the ending was too preachy, and after watching the movie
Chef, I discovered a similar plot had been done before—and better.
So, after hours and hours of writing and revising over the course of four months, I decided
to trunk that story.
From that experience, I learned that stories about current issues shouldn’t try so hard
to teach a lesson—didactic writing is a turn-off for many readers.
Instead of telling the reader what to think, stories should pose interesting questions
and provoke discussion.
I also found out that my first drafts tend to be heavy on dialogue and sparse on setting
description, which I improved with each revision.
I was so eager to finally write a story that felt complete, and it crushed me to know I’d
failed yet again.
There was only one solution: let it go, and write more stories.
The benefit of trunking stories is that it frees you to explore other ideas.
It’s easy to get so attached to fixing a story that doesn’t work and end up missing
out on writing the story that will work.
For example, author Laurel Snyder said her children’s novel My Jasper June was a “total
and complete failure, an absolute disaster”—the first iteration of that novel she wrote five
years prior, that is.
She had been excited to send the finished manuscript to her agent, who promptly told
her to shelve it because it wasn’t good.
After publishing her debut Orphan Island, she decided to take the main ingredients and
write the story from scratch.
She shares her experience on a post for the “Nerdy Book Club”:
“This wasn’t really a revision, but a whole new book.
And yet, the fact that I was doing it, recreating The Vine Realm, stepping back into Jasper
and Leah’s world, erased my sense of failure.
The experience made it feel like anything was possible.
As if nothing—no messy disaster of a book, no idea for a story—could ever really die.
Maybe, I thought, all the stories I’ve ever created and abandoned are still waiting for
me somewhere…”
Sometimes stories will display red flags that warn you it’s time to move on.
If your critique partners and beta readers are less than enthusiastic in their praise—simply
giving a lukewarm “I liked it” or “it was good”—that might be a sign of a trunk
story.
But it could be that the story simply needs further revisions, especially if it’s only
your first or second draft.
Abandoning a story that early is like declaring a loaf of bread inedible when it’s only
spent five minutes in the oven.
You have to wait until your draft has fully baked so you can give it a fair review.
Plus, just as some people might turn their nose up at wheat bread or pumpernickel, reading
enjoyment is a matter of tastes; someone who doesn’t like romance obviously isn’t going
to be over the moon about your kissy story with a happily-ever-after ending.
Receiving dozens of rejections can also be a good indicator, but it’s not a finality.
Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected 121 times before
going on to sell millions of copies.
Kathryn Stockett’s The Help was rejected 60 times over the course of three and a half
years, but after being published, it stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for
over a hundred weeks.
If unenthusiastic feedback and rejections aren’t a surefire way to know if a story
deserves to bite the dust, what is?
Maybe you know the story is too “out there” in terms of style, structure, or genre, so
few readers will enjoy it.
In other words, there’s no current market or audience for it.
However, Patrick Rothfuss has called his novella The Slow Regard of Silent Things a trunk story:
“When I finished it, I honestly expected it to just sit in a trunk for years.
I knew I liked it.
But I also knew it wasn’t like any sort of fantasy story I’d ever read before.
At best it was arty, at worst it was incomprehensible.
Bizarre.”
After the success of The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear, Rothfuss decided
to publish this novella as an in-between installment from the perspective of a secondary character
in the series.
It’s been a pretty polarizing book, earning a spectrum of glowing five-star reviews and
fuming one-star reviews from fans.
Rothfuss took a creative risk, and lots of authors who write unusual stories can find
an equally offbeat audience who will appreciate their work.
If you have a truly polished manuscript that you’re proud of, you don’t need to trunk
it just because it won’t be a crowd pleaser.
Really, abandoning a story to the trunk is just a gut feeling, and that awareness usually
works best in hindsight.
Say that you spend years writing your first novel, but no agent will touch it.
So, you trunk that first novel and move on.
Once you write your second and third novel or short story, you might look back on that
first one and go, “Huh.
There are some glaringly obvious amateur moves here.
I see why it didn’t get published.”
Time really is the best editor, and finishing the stories you start is an excellent form
of education.
A lot of writers don’t sell the first novel they ever write—they sell the fourth or
fifth or sixth novel, because at that point, they’ve honed their craft through practice.
Carrie was Stephen King’s fourth novel, but it was the first to be published.
Author Tobias S. Buckell says he wrote 150 short stories at the start of his career—and
abandoned over a hundred of them to the trunk.
He calls himself a Serial Iterator, rewriting ideas from scratch rather than endlessly editing
the same draft.
He makes sure he learns something from his previous stories and applies those lessons
to future ones.
It’s a form of deliberate practice and metacognition, where you analyze your own thinking process
and focus on the aspects you need to improve.
Like Laurel Snyder with her first draft of My Jasper June, many writers will produce
a book, realize it’s crap, and then do a page-one rewrite of the concept—an iteration
of the idea.
This might involve using an outline built from what they learned while writing that
first draft, which is what Marissa Meyer did as author of the sci-fi Cinderella retelling
Cinder.
In an interview, she talks about how she scrapped all the first drafts she wrote during National
Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo): “I’d finished the first draft, and then
some.
Cinder came in at around 70,000 words, the second novel (Scarlet) was right around 50,000,
and then I’d gotten 30,000 haphazard words into Cress.
However, all three of those novels have had to be completely scrapped and started over
from scratch during revisions—which is just fine by me.
I may not produce anything of quality during NaNoWriMo, but I always come away with a great
roadmap.”
Nowadays, Meyer is a self-proclaimed neurotic outliner, spending weeks plotting before writing,
although she says, “everything usually ends up changing about a third of the way through
the draft and I have to revise my outline as much as I revise the actual book.”
When approaching a page-one rewrite, identify the ingredients in your trunked story that
initially sparked your interest.
What was it about the world, plot, or characters that captured your imagination?
Reimagine that core idea in a new story.
As writer Mckayla Eaton suggests in a blog post:
“My favorite way to rework trunk stories is to change something integral.
Keep the plot but change the setting or the genre.
If you have a crime thriller and turn it into a science fiction story you’ve got an entirely
new story on your hands and you’ve changed the appeal of it.”
You could also consider combining ideas from two different stories, as author Jeff Somers
did: “One novel I was working on for years had
a solid plot, a good framework of events and motives, but it lacked interesting characters
and lush description.
A second book, separated from the first by several years, had a cast of characters I
loved spending time with, but meandered through a plot that barely qualified.
Taking the two and combining them resulted in a strong novel that popped off the page.
I haven’t sold that novel yet, but my agent is enthusiastic.”
Many writers return to certain themes in their works, so just because you trunk something
doesn’t mean you can’t tell a version of that story elsewhere, or convey the same
idea in a different way.
But the important thing is to revise your stories from both a structural and a style
perspective.
Tinker with your drafts instead of tossing them straight into the trunk, but don’t
be afraid to start from scratch if it feels right.
Although trunking stories is largely an intuitive process, you can apply a few durability tests
to determine if it’s time to try something else.
First, get honest feedback from other writers.
Your non-writer family and friends might give you a good general assessment of whether the
story works or doesn’t, but they likely won’t be able to put into words why it doesn’t
work or how to fix it.
Use critique groups, forums, or professional editors to request feedback from strangers
who don’t care about protecting your ego.
It’s just like learning to play a sport or an instrument—to get help, you go to
people who already know what they’re doing.
To write better, you need feedback from writers.
Second, let it sit for a few months or years, and finish a new project.
Patience is a virtue in the writing world, as it can take years to get one story or novel
published, even if you’re self-publishing.
Keep honing your craft through reading and writing, then come back to that story with
a fresh perspective.
Read it as a stranger would.
What do you notice about the story now that you didn’t before?
Would you still be proud to have it published?
Use your answers to help you revise or trunk the project.
In fact, that might be the best way to tell if a story needs to be trunked—don’t just
wait, but write something else while you wait, and then come back to it.
If you’re still as in love with it and in awe of your handiwork after you’ve written
something else, don’t give up.
But if in the clearer light of immersing your mind in something else, you find the story’s
rough edges are actually gaping flaws, it’s probably time to put it in the trunk.
Third, list the story’s strengths and weaknesses.
Maybe the opening has a great hook, but the ending feels unsatisfying—brainstorm new
ideas to fix that instead of being lazy and declaring it “good enough.”
If the weaknesses are more about people not liking experimental fiction or the editors
saying they’ve seen too many stories about time travel, then that’s a matter of finding
the right audience, so don’t worry about subjective tastes in terms of genre.
Above all, remember that trunking a story doesn’t mean you’ve failed as a writer,
nor does it mean the story will never get told.
You can always come back and revise stories when you’re older and wiser.
You’re putting them in storage, not throwing them away.
Be proud of working through your mistakes and failed stories, because they prove you
have the persistence it takes to be a writer.
What has made you trunk a story?
Are you interested in revisiting that project?
Make me feel better about my own trunk stories in the comments.
Whatever you do, keep writing.