Ten Years and One Rewrite

"The House on Sheridan Street" was originally written in 2008. It came out in December, but in the way of things in publishing, it had been finished and sent in much earlier in the year. By the time of its release, it was probably already an inaccurate reflection of the property market.

Ten years and one rewrite later, I'm realizing that global financial crises aren't the only unforeseen event that's turned this story into something very different to the original.

I can't remember where the idea initially came from -- I do remember that, at the time, I was deeply fascinated by urban exploration, in particular people who explored abandoned places. The eerie, hauntingly beautiful photos they'd post of disused buildings, vacant houses and derelict theme parks stirred something in me that was unsettled and mesmerized all at once. There was such a profound wrongness to these places, locations that should've been teeming with the mundanity of everyday human life -- offices, hotels, shopping malls, schools, hospitals -- standing hollowed out and empty, their ordinary contents left exactly where they'd been when the last person turned out the lights and closed the door. Waiting, it seemed to me. Like someone was going to step through the door any second, and the normal world would kick right back in. The idea for the eponymous 'house' came from that, from the sense that these silent, forgotten places held stories and secrets of their own.

Gale and Nathan came afterwards (names I picked up, as an aside, from my spam mail folder!), but with a hard word limit of 20k, they never really had the chance to come alive in the way I'd wanted. They were almost metaphors for the house themselves, waiting for some life to be breathed into them.

I've had much more leeway to do that in the re-write. And, in exploring and expanding the characters' backstories in more depth -- and their uneasy, messy relationships with their respective families -- I find I'm tapping into things I never, ever expected I'd use for my writing. Things that, ten years ago, hadn't even been on my radar. Things that, two years ago, I never wanted to touch, things I was perfectly happy to shove to the back of my mind and leave there. I was treating memories and emotions the same way people treated those abandoned places -- shut off the light, close the door, pretend it doesn't exist anymore. But writing, stories, are how I process and understand my world, so I shouldn't be surprised those things refused to stay there. I'm still not okay with writing about them -- I don't think I ever will be -- but maybe this way I can process a little tangentially anyway. Maybe I can at least give Gale and Nathan a truthfulness their story deserves.

And it's made me realize how true it is that sometimes, a story just isn't ready for us, or we're not ready for it. We don't have the experience, or the understanding necessary to quite do it justice, to give it honesty. I've always been a proponent of that reading of "Write what you know" -- as in, write the things you know you feel -- and I think that's just an extension of it.

Sometimes we don't know what we feel until we can look back at it and see. Sometimes the door's not closed as firmly as we like to imagine.