This advice to young writers: never trash, burn, or delete the words you have written. There could be a time when you will discover in them the story you always intended, but could not quite understand in the early writing.
Such was my experience in the writing of Taking Lottie Home.
In the mid-70s, I began a story that was inspired by living in the same hometown as the great baseball player Ty Cobb. I wanted it to be the story of a small town’s reaction to celebrity. Four or five book-length versions later (so long ago, I don’t remember details), I was advised by the publisher to stop punishing myself (and them), and to start a new book. I did. But I did not destroy what I had written.
Early in 1999, while struggling with a story that I passionately wanted to write, but found irritating and elusive, I browsed through my files one day and found the old book. (It was titled The Memorial.) Something compelled me to read it again. A few pages in, I found Lottie, a minor character. I knew immediately that I had failed her in that early writing. And in the mystic way that characters have of revealing themselves, she forgave my blindness and began to tell me who she was.
Still, I do not believe writers can crank a handle and have characters pop up like grinning faces from a jack-in-the-box. They exist ethereally in those fragments of experience that reside with everyone. I will not use names here, but Lottie, for me, was the newborn voice of a young girl I knew as a child. I heard her saying, “I might have been, I might have been…”
I hope the reader understands her journey.