Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned Not To Hide My Shite Under a Bushel

Like an elephant shopping for swimwear, I’ve been thinking a lot about trunks recently.

No, I will not apologise for that opening line.

Almost every writer you know will have a trunk. For some, it’s a drawer stuffed with half-filled notebooks covered in scrawled stories. For others, it’s a hard drive full of assorted documents, each with its own obscure name like NOVEL_PROJECT_DRAFT-37_FINAL_FINAL. Maybe one or two of them have an actual honest-to-goodness trunk: the kind that people used to take on steamships in the days before commerical air travel.

A writer might decide to ‘trunk’ something they’ve been working on for all sorts of reasons. They might start writing something and realise they only have a premise, not a plot. It might be a short story that they don’t yet realise is the start of a full novel, or a novel that needs to be hacked down until it’s the length of a short story. It may even be something polished and whole that nonetheless has failed to find someone willing to publish it. But whatever the reason, the trunk is where a story goes when the writer decides it isn’t yet ready to see the light of day.

I’ve got a pretty decent trunk of my own at this point, full of darlings I killed and projects that never quite got off the ground. As I’ve spent more and more time writing this year, both digitally and on paper, the trunk has only gotten fuller. And the more I’ve filled it up, the more uneasy it makes me feel. Because what is a trunk, really, other than an admission of failure?

Back in the summer, when I attended the Nantes Writers’ Workshop, one question constantly came up in our group discussions was about success: specifically, what did our version of success look like? Was it getting an agent? Holding a published copy of our precious novel in our hands? Or was it as simple as getting to the end of the first draft? I tend to lean towards the latter definition of success; between fatherhood and a full-time job, just putting words on a page has often felt like a monumental victory. But locking those words away in a trunk, never to see the light of day, makes that victory feel hollow. After all, art is always a collaboration — a conversation between the person who created it and the person consuming it. It’s hard to have a conversation with your head stuck inside a trunk.

So I’m opening mine up, and letting the writing out for all the world to see.

I’m sure that any writers in my audience have let out a shudder at the idea. Surely, they’re thinking, it would be madness to share every half-formed idea that tumbles out of your head? Again, I suppose that depends on what your version of success is. Maybe you want to make sure every piece you write is polished and perfected before it’s published. But I think one of the reasons I’ve stalled in the last few months is because I’ve let perfect become the enemy of good — or even of perfectly cromulent.

There’s a quote by the great Kurt Vonnegut that I must have read for the first time over a decade ago, but which my subconscious saw fit to let flicker in front of my eyeballs recently:

Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

I might be self-conscious about my trunk, but I like the idea of letting my soul grow even more. So from now on, you can expect to see more bits of fiction on here. Short stories, random scenes, maybe even chapters of a novel or two.

I’m going to try and post once a week, with the understanding that it’s a flexible target that can (and probably will) change.

I can’t promise it’ll all be good, but it’ll all be mine. And maybe that’s enough.