Light reading… light writing?

I’ve always written stories… well as soon as I could write, and before that I told stories, either to myself or to my younger sister. I had a bit of a clear out a short while ago, and going through the masses of paper I have stacked away I decided to be ruthless, and much of what I had written when I was younger I just threw out. When I told friends this some of them were quite shocked – ‘oh you should have kept it’… But why? It wasn’t any good, it wasn’t very interesting and certainly no-one else would have the slightest interest in  it… no, definitely my children  wouldn’t. Some of it that I glanced at was so embarrassingly awful that it was quite a relief to get rid of it!

I even threw away some early novels…

• “Telling All the Truth” – in a way an intriguing story-line, but so dated, corny, and clichéed… I have it in my head, so I can update it or use it to model a new novel some time… if I choose to… I could weave the main plot into another story maybe, ditch the characters and use the plot.
• “Shadows on a Silver Screen” – the title alone demonstrates how ghastly it was, I had no qualms at all about ditching this one… I shan’t even share the embarrassing plot, let alone the horrible, pretentious characters!
• “The Man in the Sun”… in a strange way, I’m quite fond of the memory of this – the couple of hundred thousand words which made up this vast what you might call a family saga went straight into the recycling bin, but there are elements which I might revive in another story… but with a completely different title!
• “Out of Time”… again there are elements which might make another story – and I know there are other novels with this title so I would have to change it which is a shame because I like it and it really fits… The actual manuscript has gone, but the story is still in my head. It starts with a girl in a poetry lesson at school, who comes across a poet in an anthology and becomes fascinated by him… twenty or so years later she meets his son… this does sound a bit of a romance, a light read, but who knows… maybe I’ll introduce some dark elements into it if it ever gets looked at again…

Now I am actually rewriting an old idea I had, just taking the basic characters and plot, rewriting, reworking, not copying or editing, but writing it anew word by word… And I think it again is definitely going to be ‘light reading’ unless I drastically change some of the elements… but maybe for a beach read, a flight read, an ill in bed with a cold read… “A Strong Hand From Above”…