The Manuscript in the Drawer

There's an old joke that if you walk down the street in Los Angeles, you can stop people randomly and ask how their screenplay is going, and 9 out of 10 will tell you. Everyone in LA, it seems, has dreams of being the next Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) or Diablo Cody (Juno.) For most, that dream never lives beyond the desire, imagination, and computer files of the writer.

There's a similar scenario that gets played out in films, novels, and on stage. That's the college English professor who has a novel in the drawer of his or her desk--a novel the writer worked hard on but never saw in book form. It's the same dynamic: I want to do it; I'm doing it; I did it. But that only applies to the writing.

What happens after you've written your screenplay or your novel or your collection of short stories? Do they live their entire life in your drawer like that favorite blue sock that lost its mate in the dryer or an old fortune cookie no one ever opened?

Perhaps you print a few copies of your manuscript for friends you can depend on to give the work high praise. "I LOVED it, they exclaim. I wish I could write like you do. Hey, just between us, Marla was based on me, right?" (Marla of course was your heroine who faced challenges with determination and wisdom and humor and eventually learned to love her whole self, untamed hair, Buddha belly and all. You love Marla, and it's amazing how many of our own stories made it into her life. Not that it was a memoir or anything.) You reward your readers' enthusiasm by putting their names on your acknowledgments page. It will look wonderful in print if the book ever gets published.

And for many of us, that's as far as it goes.

So here is my question: Is there value to the manuscript in the drawer? Was it worth the time and energy to produce those pages? If the work will never be produced in Hollywood or find space on a shelf in Barnes and Noble or be offered up on Amazon.com, was the time you spent simply wasted time, like all those exercise sessions at the gym that were negated by a plate of cheese enchiladas before the week was out? Are they related to the goldfish you got that seemed so cool at the time--a little friend!--and became a neutral element in your house, then a nuisance as you noticed the water turning green then brown and finally decided to give the little guy away to your nephew or flush Goldie to his final resting place.

I really don't know. I have three books in drawers. The first, a murder mystery, is a good book. The second, a sequel, never got the attention it needed to be revised into something solid. The third is a strong book. It has a soul. An agent agreed to read it--wanted to read it in fact--and I told her it needed a little more tweaking. I had an editor friend go through it line by line, and she returned it decorated with an abundance of marginal comments and bandaged with a colorful array of post-its.

And now it is in my sock drawer, the one that has not just one blue sock, but dozens of unmatched socks. It is the Drawer for Lost and Lonely Things.

It's a good book. But for some reason, I can't take it out of the drawer, read all of the comments, and send it off to the agent who has probably forgotten all about it. I don't know why, but that book refuses to move. It may have grown roots.

Was it worth it?