So I just found a delightful old email: the first-ever draft of my short story that, seven years later, has turned into a novel. I thought this original draft was lost to the sands of time. I wrote it in 2012 and in 2013 turned it into a longer novella which was the foundation for my current project.
But this nine-page first draft of the short story is what started it all and it is a completely bizarre read after having spent so much time in the longer form of it. It almost reads more like a summary than a story on its own. And that’s the funny thing: very little changed from this original wrote-it-in-one-sitting piece. Every scene in it is still represented in the novel and there are multiple lines that are verbatim from this first draft . . . I didn’t realize how much so.
As I was finishing edits earlier this week I was working on one line and changed a couple of words. And then I went back and reverted it to the original. In reading the short story just now it is the exact same line. No wonder I couldn’t change it! It’s been in my head so long any other line sounded wrong!
And . . . y’all . . . I completely forgot what I originally named my main character! Jack’s original name was Jim. I legitimately thought it had been Jake and I changed it but it was Jim. Right there in the first paragraph.
I had sent the story off to my friend Lin for copyedits — something I did to both my friends Lin & Cara throughout college — and this draft has immortalized their initial comments including: “change: hit, decked, whacked, etc”, “I want this alluded to earlier–especially the baby part” “good in any other story” and just “goood.” And a copious amount of tense corrections.
It’s warmed my heart a little tonight to find this again — and that’s not just the heat pack resting on my chest right now talking. A 3,000-word story that came from nowhere and it just wouldn’t let me forget about it. Even the title seemed to manifest itself right there on the roughest draft: “I Took The Cat With Me.”
Talk about Big Magic.
With Love,
Natalie