The Trunk and the Drawer
What are trunk stories? How do they end up there?
Dear Friends,
Sometimes I transform into an anthropologist when I hear an unfamiliar term that causes my ears to burn. Poets and literary writers sometimes use the metaphor of “the drawer” to talk about placing a piece of writing out-of-sight and out-of-mind (although for those who print out their writing it might literally be stored inside a drawer). It was years after I began writing fiction that I caught wind of the drawer’s cousin who is found more commonly in genre communities: the trunk.
So, what exactly is a ‘trunk novel’? What does it mean to trunk one of your stories? What does it mean to put a poem in a drawer? And why are we so in love with these figurative storage spaces?
I’d say while these two concepts overlap, they do hold slightly different meanings and ideological purposes. The idea of “the drawer” tends to refer to needing some distance from a piece of writing. It’s when you, the writer, have been going too hard with editing—or spending too much time with your creative work in general. When we approach our creative writing as an editor, often we are tasked with filling a role that is very different from that of the artist. The artist limits their questions. The artist (ideally) dives in with abandon. The editor is the one who comes in and says, yes, but who is this writing for? Does it have a purpose and does it need one? Does this piece of writing have issues with clarity, with structure, with voice?
What makes the drawer different than the trunk is that placing a piece of writing in the drawer implies a vacation: something temporary. A drawer is something you open more frequently than a trunk. The drawer is for when you think, no, I’m probably not quite done with this piece, but my editorial role is slightly compromised at the moment—and to set aside this writing will re-center me to view it with less prejudice. It feels almost like semantic satiation: you’ve been inside your words for so long that they begin to lose meaning, and you’ve begun to question your instincts. Ideally, spending some time away from your writing will make you feel more precise, more lucid.
The trunk seems to hold a slightly different connotation because, one, it implies making peace with the fact that you may be retiring this project forever. Secondarily, people tend to talk about “the trunk” with a goal of publication in the end. While there are, of course, many genre magazines, they seem to earn their professional cachet by some mixture of endurance, longevity, reader interest, and how much they pay per word. It seems this also reduces the list of “pro markets” to a much shorter list than the more nebulous landscape of lit mags.
There seems to be a near-endless list of literary magazines tied to MFA programs that have no payment beyond a contributor copy or two. For the poet, receiving payment for your writing is a novel idea. For those writing certain types of genre, it is the expected norm. If you look at which magazines publishing stories that tend to secure the Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, Locus… that list is maybe around a dozen or so magazines. And what happens when you have a short story (or novelette, or novella…) that is rejected by all of them? Well, you’re either going to have to retire that story (if publication is your ultimate goal) or lower your expectations significantly.
That being said, I also find the metaphor of the trunk can exist outside of simply feeling like you’ve run out of options for publication.
Creative writing often feels akin to stage magic to me. When you do it seamlessly, the reader can immerse themselves like an audience member at a magic show. You, the onlooker, don’t know how the trick is done. It feels like real magic, like something supernatural could possibly be happening. For a moment, you are ensorcelled, as if you, yourself might be levitating while lost in another person’s words.
At your—the writer’s—apex, you won’t even quite understand how you wrote your own story in retrospect. This is perhaps the highest form of literary magic: to be so deep within your own spell that you cast words that cannot be reverse-engineered.
On the other side of the spectrum, the magic reveals itself to you. You can dismantle the trick, see how it’s done. You see the fishing line holding up the floating glass orb. You say, oh, there’s that image I borrowed from Nabokov, there’s that syntax I borrowed from Morrison. You either see all your tricks in action, or you see your own sloppiness and know if you were to take this act on stage, the audience would be highly unlikely to be mesmerized. They, too, would be unable to surrender to the illusion once they know how the playing card vanishes.
Even outside of publication, the best trunked stories come with a level of self-awareness. This is a self-awareness of your own current limits. It’s an appreciation that a piece of writing was an exercise or an experiment, and it can easily be retired having served its purpose. Not everything a person writes needs to (or should) be sent out for publication. With self-awareness comes self-discipline—discretion. I would also say with artistic practice comes a type of shrewdness about which aspects of your writing are the types of callbacks or echoes that readers might find meaning in, and which come off as your craft being limited because you are reusing the same feat from another piece of writing (which drains the magic from the prior piece).
Self-awareness also means knowing the difference between this is my obsession, and the world must know about it! and okay, glad I got that out of my system. Next!
For illustrative purposes, here are some reasons that you might trunk a piece of writing:
You knew, going in, that this piece of writing was an experiment. The goal was experiencing the process itself—not dwelling on the product. You learned something by trying a new structure, a new voice, a genre you don’t normally write in, an unfamiliar form, a tense you don’t normally write in…. Ultimately, you are satisfied (or even unsatisfied), but realize it is time to move on once the experiment is complete.
You wrote the story for a specific prompt (e.g.: one shared by a facilitator in a writing class; one written for a themed issue of a literary magazine; one written for an anthology or contest…). Perhaps you submitted it and it was rejected. Perhaps you never submitted it at all. Either way, the writing does not make sense outside of that narrow exercise or submission call (or isn’t as connected to your larger body of work).
You’re in a period of rapid growth, and as soon as you finish the piece you realize it was both integral to your writer growth but not something that needs to be shared with another human.
While I will say we all need to be careful about letting other people’s voices unrestrictedly place value on our writing—sometimes you might have a beta reader or a workshop group uncover more issues in a piece of reading than you care to resolve, and trunking it seems like the best option.
You realize that your ambitions are loftier than your skills or your capacity to come up with the language at the moment (this is not a bad thing!). It takes a discerning mind to know that you just haven’t accrued enough ingredients to complete the recipe yet.
You realize you’re reusing ideas/language from a previous piece in a way that feels regressive rather than resonating.
You realize this piece has a different scale than what you initially imagined (e.g.: a short story that might be a novel in disguise).
You realize you’re too influenced by another writer (or creator) and to claim this piece is entirely your own would be ethically dubious. Alternatively, you discover a comparative piece by another creator that feels like it pulled your own idea off better.
The work has politics, ideas, or themes that you either no longer believe in or are questioning your own position to tell these stories authentically or accurately.
Sometimes there are stories that for the life of you, you just can’t seem to get right. Editing just creates more problems. It’s a je ne sais quoi of wrongness. You can’t explain why you cannot fix it, but it seems the only option is to retire it.
Sometimes you just feel anchored by your obsession with a certain piece, and you need to trunk it to liberate yourself and move onto other ideas you’re more excited about. Often these goodbyes are the hardest.
While trunking may be a bittersweet part of the writing process, it does speak to a certain astuteness one must develop because it is equally important to have a critical relationship with your own writing beyond just a purely creative one. Ultimately, it is up to each of us to figure out which of our creative works we must fight to the death for, and which we must set free (and by set free I mean hide away into a wooden crate at the foot of our beds to collect dust).
Trunking, like most creative activities, requires an acumen we must individually develop to be able to take ownership in a way that honors our truest artistic selves.
I’d like to end this by saying that although most of these examples were focused on a more limited genre (stories & novels), I did not mean to suggest the experience of trunking is exclusive to fictionists—or even writers. As always, I hope that even though this newsletter is centered on the literary arts that other types of creatives (or even non-creatives) can find some takeaway in them. I know a number of visual artists read this newsletter, so I’d love to know how other types of artists negotiate retiring an artwork before it reaches a much wider audience. When does the painter know that the canvas should go into the cellar instead of on the gallery wall? When does the composer reach for the quiet?
These are rhetorical questions, yes, but I’d also love to hear what your experience is with the trunk and the drawer. How do you know when something should be stored away—or when it should be presented before the world?
Until next time,
JD