What I’m writing:

The same thing I was writing 5 years ago

I had an uncomfortable realization a few months ago about a novel I worked very hard on for several years but never finished. The realization was that I should have finished it.

I did finish it, technically; I wrote an entire draft. But as I did so, I knew that the draft in its entirety didn’t work, that the project would require a deep excavation and rewriting in order to be viable.

Unfortunately, the time I planned to use for that excavation became the pandemic, when my toddler son was suddenly home with me 24-7. But I didn’t give up hope. I’d get back to the novel as soon as I could, I told myself. I applied to a writer’s conference the following winter and got accepted and submitted an excerpt from that novel, which one student in the workshop loved and the other seemed relatively neutral about (it was a very small workshop).

But it was what the workshop instructor said that stuck with me. He said he loved the flashbacks included in the excerpt; he wanted to read that story. The present-tense part of the story—the narrative on which my entire novel was built—made little sense to him. He didn’t know why anybody would want to read it.