Prose Night at the Writing Life, 9 November 2024

A Writer's Biography, Volume 2, Part 10: The Ghosts of Writing Projects Past

Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: For new visitors or subscribers to this Substack, this Prose Night entry is another in a continuing series I have been writing ever since beginning to blog on Wordpress several years previously, which I’ve called A Writer’s Biography. These essays have been looks back at my life through the lens of writing and my experiences of writing. My original intent is to try and provide some advice or inspiration to writers in similar situations to myself, although I realize this project has turned into something resembling a memoir (which I haven’t started to tackle as an actual serious project).

I’ve separated these into three “volumes:” Volume I, detailing my early childhood and first experiences with reading and writing; Volume II, detailing my experiences with writing as a young man and during the “quiet times” of my writing, and Volume III, where I discuss how things are in middle age and resuming my life as a writer. Since this story covers some projects and times when I was not an active of a writer, or at least a lot more inconsistent, I decided to make this a Volume II story. All you paid subscribers can check out all the Writer’s Biography posts in my archives.]

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A Writer's Biography, Volume 2, Part 10: The Ghosts of Writing Projects Past

I wonder what Stephen King’s morgue looks like.

This probably requires a bit of explanation, since I think just made up a term¹. But in the very perfunctory research I did on a small portion of the interwebs, my instinct is I’ve repurposed an old one.

The common word for what I’m thinking of is what are called trunk stories. As in, you stash them in a trunk, not likely ever to be looked at again². However, I decided to use a term from my previous life as a journalist.

Of course, everyone has heard the term morgue used before to describe a place to store bodies. But in the old time newspaper business, a morgue is the place where a newspaper kept news clippings from old stories, usually from its own publication but sometimes from others, especially for important stories of nationwide, statewide, and especially local importance. These were usually organized in microfilm storage if a newspaper was very sophisticated, or it might have simply been a group of filing cabinets holding manila folders of cut-out newsprint stories, photocopies of the same, or some combination of the time. Some of them were organized according to their publication date, or more often by subject matter.

Usually, this area was used by reporters to gather background information on their stories. It was a fast way of finding this information, especially in the pre-Internet era when not every newspaper archive was digitized and itemized.

In some cases, there was such a thing as a digital morgue, a location where past stories could be indexed and referred to in new reporting. Sometimes, a morgue could also refer to a place where you put stories intended for future use. One important circumstance was when you composed a story to be run in the event someone famous dies, such as big time political leaders or entertainers.

From my perspective, I like the idea of an old morgue of half-started stories and ideas from my past experiences. For me, I have both a physical and digital morgue, or perhaps a hybrid one.

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Most of the physical representations of my work are tucked into not a trunk or trunks but (appropriate for the 21st century) some plastic totes in my storage building. I haven’t had the chance to look at those yet. Those include some of my writing from even my high school years, stuff I haven’t seen in a decade or so.

My electronic morgue, however, has some writing of a somewhat more recent nature. This included several pieces of writing which I started and stopped over the course of at least one or two decades.

Those were the fallow years, when I plied my trade as first a journalist and then as a teacher but I went years without even sitting in front of a desktop or laptop on my own volition without being paid, without having anything to do with telling a community what happened at its latest city council meeting or teaching a kid how to write with some semblance of skill. Sure, I called myself a writer. But I went years in those days without writing a word.

However, over the course of several years, I’ve had the chance to write more nonfiction essays online and fiction. I got serious about my writing in 2010 or so when I started realizing I wasn’t getting any younger and I wasn’t interested in wasting more time on personal activities (gaming, distractions, etc.) that weren’t adding anything to my existence. Now, this was a long process, but within a few years I felt like I wasn’t fooling myself when I called myself a writer³.