Origin story
- Erin Fitzgerald
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Once upon a time, I finished a novel draft.
WIP title: Redacted Lawn Chair. Genre: Fantasy. Subgenre: Dunno. Length: 150 pages. Too short for sure, but it was the first time I'd tried to write longer fiction since grad school.
By the time January 23, 2015 had arrived I was just pleased the main character was where I knew they needed to be at the end. Both of us were happy-tired. How tired? I'd written an unrelated novella during the worst phases of the novel writing. The novella was ready to step up, so there was no better excuse to set the novel draft aside.
That's how Redacted Lawn Chair fell into a deep sleep for just over ten years.
I've tried writing memoirish things about 2015-2025 many, many times, because a lot happened to my family and to me. The only attempt that's made it past "thanks, but not for me/us/this issue/this project" is in this anthology. (Thanks so much, Hannah!)
This is where I know I'm expected to show receipts, to make you think either "Holy shit!" or "So what?" But that's part of the problem I often have doing this kind of writing.
I think about why memoir is difficult for me a lot, so I'm sure it'll come up again. For now, here's a shorthand analogy for how my relationship with the real and the imaginary work:
Anyway! Last month, I had a overdue conversation at a party with a friend I'll call Holyoak. Long ago Holyoak and I often went on quests together in another world as a dwarf and an elf, but now we're mostly humans in this world.
Toward the end of catching up on the last few aeons of our lives, Holyoak asked me how my writing was going.
I snort-laughed. "I keep writing first drafts for novels and then setting them aside forever because I realize I'm just writing them to make sense of other things."
"How many so far?" Holyoak asked, stroking his grey beard thoughtfully.
"Three and a half," I said.
"When did you write the first one?"
I thought for a minute. "About ten years ago, I think?"
"You should look at that one now," he said.
A few hours later, as we were doing party farewells, Holyoak said: "Let me know how it goes."
I said I would, and that was how the quest began.
On the way home I remembered more about Redacted Lawn Chair. The flash fiction that started it all, and the what-if that was its fuel. I remembered that I'd written most of the novel longhand because the main character writes their story longhand into a grimoire. Doing that was how I became a left-handed person who prefers a fountain pen for long distance writing.
But mostly, I remembered that it had taken NINE TIMES to get an important section of the story right. Not just the novel, the story itself. NINE TIMES! At least fifty pages per attempt! Nearly all attempts very different from each other. NINE TIMES! Point A known, Point B known. NINE TIMES! Did the ninth time even work? Ugh. NINE TIMES!
Even though the draft had been asleep for over a decade, I winced as I drove.
The next day I excavated Redacted Lawn Chair from its Scrivener tomb.
I parked a copy of the resulting PDF in my iPad book collection, where I wouldn't be able to line edit or write notes.
I read it in two sessions the weekend after I'd talked to Holyoak, and I had so many thoughts.
So I printed the PDF, and borrowed my husband C's three hole punch. I've put Redacted Lawn Chair into a black 1.5" binder, and let's do this.
