Writers are often told to keep every scrap of writing, every half-finished idea, every abandoned paragraph, no matter how insignificant or directionless it seems at the time. For years, I did this almost compulsively, stuffing note apps with fragments, saving hundreds of stray files on my laptop, keeping dialogue snippets on my phone, and hoarding concept sketches for novels that never escaped the planning stage. I didn’t do this because I expected those scraps to become masterpieces one day. In truth, I kept them because throwing them away felt like discarding something alive, or at least something with the potential to grow. At the time, I didn’t fully understand that this habit was less about organisation and more about preservation. I wasn’t collecting clutter. I was building a kind of creative landscape, a layered site full of buried stories and the remains of earlier versions of myself. Only recently did I realise that, like any archaeological site, those layers reveal far more than polished, complete objects. They form a map of my imagination, stretching further back than I ever intended.
When I began writing my Short Sharp Shock collection, I assumed the stories would come from new sparks, new obsessions, and fresh experiments. I expected the familiar rush of discovering a new idea and watching it unfold in real time. But once I began drafting, I found that my mind drifted not towards new ground but towards old notes that had been sitting untouched for years. Suddenly, discarded fragments from novels I once intended to write were resurfacing. Ideas I abandoned at the outline stage began to feel relevant again. Even scribbled sentences I barely remembered crafting seemed to whisper, “Look again.” The more I sifted through my archives, the more those remnants began to connect. Old ideas spoke to one another. Unearthed fragments clicked together, sometimes perfectly, as if they had been waiting for this moment. It became clear that writing wasn’t always a matter of creating something new from a blank page. More often, it was an act of excavation, of digging through forgotten material to find the parts still shining beneath the dust.
Excavating the Ruins of Old Novels
Many of the stories in Short Sharp Shock have origins that stretch back across multiple drafts, abandoned chapters, and notes I had convinced myself I no longer needed. Some pieces began as failed novel openings, the kind that felt promising for a few pages before collapsing under their own weight. At the time, I saw these as creative dead ends, and I moved on quickly, frustrated that the ideas refused to grow into the sprawling books I had imagined. Yet when I revisited those early attempts years later, with a different mindset and a clearer understanding of my own voice, I realised that the issue was not the idea itself but the scale. These fragments were not failed beginnings. They were seeds in the wrong soil. Short fiction offered them something that a novel never could: boundaries. Space to be unsettling without needing a grand plot. Permission to be strange without worrying about sustaining that oddness for three hundred pages. What once felt unwieldy and ill-fitting suddenly became concise, eerie, and perfectly suited to the form.
There were also fragments that had no connection to any larger work—odd lines of dialogue, unnerving images, or descriptions that had drifted into my head late at night. When I found them again, I saw them differently. They weren’t isolated moments but clues. Some belonged together, even when I hadn’t realised it at the time. A scene I’d scribbled from one idea became the emotional centre of a story inspired by a completely different note written years earlier. The process reminded me of piecing together pottery shards from two separate excavations, only to discover they formed a single vessel. Storytelling is full of these unexpected reunions between fragments, and when you learn to recognise them, the story begins to assemble itself almost naturally.
Traces from the Creatures Books
Long before Short Sharp Shock, I had another example of this archaeological process without fully recognising it. When I was working on the Creatures books, I generated piles of notes on worldbuilding, lore, minor characters, and strange concepts I didn’t know how to use. Many of these notes were cast aside early in the drafting stages, and I assumed the series had outgrown them. Yet when I returned to the world for later books, I kept encountering echoes of these same ideas. Characters who were once nothing more than throwaway sketches suddenly demanded attention. Mythological hints from earlier drafts developed into full storylines. Even the tone of certain scenes was informed by notes I had scribbled years earlier but forgotten entirely.
It was like walking through a dig site where earlier structures shape the foundations of the newer ones. The series gained depth not because I planned a vast overarching narrative from the beginning, but because the remnants of earlier concepts continued to nudge me towards themes and motifs I hadn’t consciously decided to explore. Revisiting old notes didn’t simply provide material for later instalments; it enriched the world, strengthened the internal logic, and gave the series a sense of history. Those early fragments weren’t abandoned—they were waiting, buried under layers of new material, until I learned to recognise their relevance.
Why Writers Need to Become Archaeologists
Writers often talk about inspiration as if it’s something fleeting and fragile, a momentary spark that can be lost if you don’t act on it immediately. But inspiration is more resilient than that. It settles. It buries itself. It waits. What appears to be a lost idea is often just an idea waiting for the right story, the right form, or the right version of you to bring it to life. This is why the habit of keeping everything matters. Notes are not a waste. Drafts are not failures. Abandoned stories are not dead. They form layers that hold meaning even when you don’t yet understand what that meaning is.
The work of an archaeologist requires patience, curiosity, and a willingness to see value in fragments that may appear insignificant. Writing demands the same. When you return to your old notes, you aren’t searching for a complete story. You’re looking for a spark, a tone, a thread of emotion, or a detail that resonates more now than it did years ago. Often, those fragments reveal a version of the story that was too complex or too raw for you when you first wrote it. You weren’t ready to write it then, but you might be now. That realisation can be transformative. It changes the way you approach both creativity and self-critique.
Building New Stories from Old Foundations
When I assembled Short Sharp Shock, I began to realise that I wasn’t crafting the collection from new ideas alone. I was building on the foundations of earlier drafts, abandoned outlines, and failed experiments. Some stories took shape only because I revisited a note I’d written years earlier and suddenly saw its purpose with clarity. Others grew from multiple fragments that merged into something unexpected. And some came from ideas I had dismissed as too odd, too small, or too incomplete—only to realise that those qualities made them ideal for short fiction.
The more I leaned into this archaeological approach, the more natural the process felt. Instead of viewing old notes as outdated or irrelevant, I treated them as a kind of creative record. They formed a timeline of my imagination, allowing me to trace recurring themes and ideas. If a concept appeared multiple times across years of notes, I knew it mattered. If a character idea lingered in my mind long after I’d abandoned the original project, I knew there was something unresolved about them. This kind of excavation does more than generate stories; it teaches you how your mind works, what you gravitate towards, and what parts of your imagination won’t leave you alone.
The Quiet Magic of Rediscovery
There’s something uncanny about finding a line you wrote years ago and realising it now holds the key to a story you’re writing today. It feels like receiving a message from a past version of yourself—a version who didn’t know what the future story would become but sensed something important enough to write down. These rediscoveries don’t feel like nostalgia. They feel like a revelation. They remind you that creativity isn’t linear. Ideas travel in loops. They resurface when you need them, not when you expect them.
This quiet magic has followed me through both short fiction and longer series. With the Creatures books, it manifested as echoes that grew into arcs. With Short Sharp Shock, it revealed itself as fragments that found new purpose after years underground. And even now, in my newer projects, I can feel that same archaeological pull. Each time I start something new, I’m aware of the layers beneath my feet. I know that somewhere in those notes lies a detail, a voice, or an image that will one day rise to the surface.
Writing as Digging, Not Just Building
We often imagine writing as an act of construction, laying ideas like bricks to form something coherent and complete. But the longer I write, the more I realise that creativity rarely begins with building. It begins with digging. Beneath every story lies a foundation of forgotten ideas, old experiments, and earlier attempts that shape what the story eventually becomes.
Dig through your notes. Revisit your abandoned drafts. Look at your scraps not as failures but as layers waiting to be uncovered. When you treat your own creative history like an excavation site, you discover that nothing you’ve written is ever truly lost. Every fragment is a clue. Every scribble is a seed. And every abandoned idea is part of the landscape waiting for you to return with fresh eyes and the right tools.
If writing is building, then your archive is the ground on which you build. And hidden within that ground are the stories you haven’t yet written, waiting patiently to be unearthed.
Gareth Ellis - Author 