Member-only story
Mine Your Drafts for Hidden Gems
You could learn a lot. Like why they’re drafts for a reason.
Many of the great works of art remain unfinished. Often because the creator died before they could complete it.
Well, luckily (or unluckily) for you all, I’m still alive, and some of my incomplete articles from the last year or two are just begging to be revisited.
So, I delved into my drafts to see whether any of them deserved to see the light of day. Perhaps I could improve and publish them, I thought.
Well, upon closer inspection, I think they’re beyond saving. Or maybe I’m just too lazy.
But I am going to leave a few of them below, in their unfinished state, as a warning to other writers — learn from my mistakes.
Draft 1: A Cuttlefish Christmas
Jessica is a career-driven 29-year-old journalist who writes a weekly column for a well-respected London food blog. She doesn’t need a boyfriend, thank you very much.
Hank is a 1-year-old, 20 cm-long marine mollusc who lives with Jessica’s sister and brother-in-law in smalltank Minnesota. He is unemployed, but happy. At least he seems happy; it’s hard to tell.
On paper, the two have little in common. On screen, the two have little in common. But no one said love would be easy.
Jessica is midway through a scathing review of Thai Dye — a fusion restaurant with rainbow-coloured noodles — when her phone buzzes. It’s her older sister Susan, who relocated to the U.S after meeting her husband Dave on a badger interrogation workshop in Wyoming.
Susan invites Jessica to celebrate Christmas at their home in rural Minnesota. But she has no inkling that a soft-bodied specimen might just soften her heart.
Why I Gave Up
As is often the case, I shot myself in the foot by going too niche — the Venn Diagram of cephalopod enthusiasts and corny-Christmas-movie lovers doesn’t have a huge overlap.
I must have decided that laboriously crafting cuttlefish-related puns was time better spent doing almost literally anything else.
