Little boxes of the past

The thing about short stories is that they are themselves little boxes of the past, even if you'd never meant for them to be.

Ann Patchett, These Precious Days

Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett says earlier in her essay "The Nightstand" that she always "wanted to be judged by my best work, the finished product." Flawed early stories and early drafts did not interest her. Yet when one of those early stories is found in an old family nightstand, now owned by someone else, and when her mother presents her with a box of her early stories and other items from her past, the novelist yields and reads her early work. This leads to the line quoted above about stories being "boxes of the past."

Stories may not reveal as much about an author's life as diaries do, but they are close, which is why literary biographers pay so much attention to them. Early stories especially tend to be autobiographical, revealing secrets about authors' lives they may not have even realized they were revealing.

Early drafts of published work can also be revealing "boxes of the past." They show how writing evolved into something grand. In his book The Artful Dickens, John Mullan describes how early drafts of the novels of Charles Dickens show how he experimented with different words, different phrases, different names until he arrived at something that pleased him, which now pleases us in his novels.

Modern writers use computers, making those valuable early drafts nonexistent. Fortunately Ann Patchett began her career with a typewriter.