Writing Through the Years

The other morning at my desk, fifty pages into writing a new novel, I found myself inventing a scene set in Central Park in the mid-1980s, a time when I had lived in New York with my boyfriend (now husband). I was reminded that in the early ’90s, after moving to Philadelphia, I had drafted a whole novel set in New York during the mid-’80s. I hadn’t thought about that book in years. But here I was again with a fictional setting I had first explored thirty-five years earlier. I clicked out of my new manuscript and went to search my files for the long-forgotten book.

Back then, even with computers widely available, I still penned the first draft of that novel longhand before typing it onto my Dell laptop. I then approached an agent friend and received a tepid response. I wasn’t too deterred. I felt confident there was something to this book and wanted to improve it. But I soon lost interest when our first child arrived. It was a difficult birth and I needed months to recover. When I returned to the manuscript, something had changed. I had changed. The story seemed impossibly far from me. Motherhood and regaining my strength took all my attention.

Years passed, the manuscript stayed in a drawer, and a second child arrived. I focused on being a mother and had time to write only an occasional poem or an essay about this all-consuming new stage of life. When our second child went off to nursery school, I brought out the old manuscript, looked it over, and felt nothing for it. Or to be more precise, I felt an aversion. A story is about a group of post-college friends and a main female character who becomes caught up in a love triangle with two of them, makes bad choices, and suffers dangerous consequences—this troubled landscape felt far from my new life, so rich with family and the all-consuming world of children.

I’ve returned to the novel several times since then. In the 2000s, I hired a typist to transfer if from floppy to hard disk. Some years later, I retyped it to conform to a new format. Each time, the writing felt foreign to me and the story remained dissonant with my life. In the meantime, I published four other novels, and I have a fifth one, Marriage and Other Monuments, forthcoming in February 2026.

But the other day when I reread that manuscript from the ’90s, I recognized it as my own and began to feel something for it. For one thing, the writing seemed daring. Each of my published novels proceeds in chronological order. But this unpublished one jumps in time as a half dozen voices narrate the story. Was I more courageous as a younger writer, or more foolish?

Now the once-troubling plot and characters posed only an interesting writing challenge. I had the right kind of emotional distance, on the narrative and on the writing itself. My husband and I have been married for thirty-eight years and the imagined world of these twenty-somethings in NYC of the mid-’80s is basically historical fiction!

As I read further, I saw that in 2017 I had written whole new sections and added a plot line. I didn’t recall doing that, but the additions helped complicate the story in an interesting way. I was finally able see it afresh and improve it. But how much did I want to?

Considering whether to resurrect an old manuscript led me to consider the changes that we and our work go through over the span of a writing career. I found myself wondering whether other writers explore settings, characters, or themes in their fiction only to discover they’ve covered the same territory before. And whether they sometimes find their early work bafflingly distant. Readers may recognize threads that run through an author’s body of work. Do writers recognize those same threads when they look back over decades of their work? Do writers necessarily repeat themselves in the course of a long career, and if so, is that a strength or a weakness?

My discovery of a viable novel sitting in a drawer and the questions this experience prompted has led me to ask several established writer friends if they’ve had similar experiences. I’m pleased to share with you some of their insights.

Anne Bernays has been a published writer for sixty-seven years, with ten novels, three non-fiction books, scores of nationally published essays, travel pieces, book reviews, and op-eds. Here’s how she describes her experience of writing: “Once I tell a story, it’s gone from me. It no longer has a hold on me.” If Anne were to look back on earlier books, she assumes she would be surprised, but mostly, she doesn’t look back. As she put it, at each age, she just wanted to tell a new story.

“But you’re not going to write the same story at twenty-five as you’ll write at fifty-five. At fifty-five,” she said, “you have more baggage.” When asked what she meant by that, she clarified that your life is richer, and you have more choices in what you can write about. Age, in her opinion, is a plus for a writer. We gather writerly knowledge with the years.

On the website Aging and the Creative Process, Anne described creativity in later years this way: “Ideas not only grab me with the same intensity [as they did when younger], they seem to come to me on sturdier wings and there are flocks of them. That doesn’t mean that I take every idea and turn it into prose. But I like having them; they are what a Yiddish speaker would call a Mitzvah.”

Pamela Painter, short story author with five published collections and innumerable literary awards, suggested that there’s a difference between how a novelist looks back on their work and how a short story writer does. “Short stories can circle back around,” she said. A story written long ago may rise to the surface when the author is approached to include it in an anthology—almost always with no changes. A number of Pam’s stories have been turned into screenplays, read at public events by actors, and reprinted in textbooks. She said, “Once published, stories can have an on-going life of their own.”

When I asked if she had ever considered revising a story before republishing, she shook her head, though she said it is true that some of the same situations and themes keep recurring in her stories. That Pam doesn’t ever revise older stories, to me, is remarkable, as I might want to keep tinkering with a work, even once published. I know authors, me included, who revise at the podium when reading from their published book. The temptation to continually improve, word by word, is strong.

Pam is also the co-author with Anne Bernays of the popular textbook on writing fiction, What If? Writing Exercises for Writers. She said that though she never revises her published short stories, she and Anne were delighted to revise their textbook, now in its third textbook edition, and to add new exercises as they both grew as writers and as teachers of writing.

Leslie Pietrzyk, award-winning author with two story collections and three published novels, responded this way when asked to look back on her writing career: “I remember hearing early on during my MFA that writers have one deep, core story that they tell over and over. For a long time, I felt that was true, for me and, in a larger sense, in the books I read. Now, years later, I feel that the core story can and has changed for me. When my writing returns to settings or material that might feel familiar, I feel that my view is from a different vantage.”

A changing vantage point seems inevitable given the changing stages of life. Our subjects may remain the same, but how we see life necessarily evolves. As I return to writing about characters who are much younger than me now, I feel that some of them are practically children, making the mistakes that young people make when playing at being grown-ups. I didn’t have that vantage point when I first wrote the novel. The telling of the story will no doubt change, hopefully for the better, and benefit from my ability to look back on my own past and on an earlier historical period with greater clarity.

Steve Yarbrough, author of a dozen highly praised books of fiction, reflected on his experience of writing over many decades: “My first collection of stories, published in 1990, was set in my hometown and parts of the next two story collections were, too, as was my first novel, The Oxygen Man, which came out in 1999. The following four novels, published between 2001 and 2012, were all set in a thinly veiled fictional version of the town. I went back to it for part of Stay Gone Days (2022) after staying away for a decade. I’m presently writing a novel set there, but it takes place more than twenty-five years ago. I can’t write about the town as it exists now, unless I wanted to view it as an outsider. For all practical purposes, the place that mattered to me, which I both hated and loved, doesn’t exist anymore. And yes, pretty much all my novels, including the most recent, feel like they were written by someone else. It happens pretty quickly after they are done. I don’t fully understand why that is.”

Clearly, mysteries abound in the writing process. Who can say why we let go of a piece of writing after it is completed to the extent that we hardly know it years later. Or why setting, themes, situations, or even characters recur in fiction we’ve written decades apart. I may not recognize sentences I wrote years ago, but some part of me remains that same writer, scratching out similar stories again and again, sometimes to my own surprise. In the end, we have no choice but to respect the way the creative process works and to trust the accumulated wisdom that comes with writing through the years.

Has your writing changed as you’ve changed with the years? Do the words you write today carry within them the writer you once were? Is repetition in your work a shortcoming or evidence of an artistic voice that defines you?

Check out this selection by these prolific authors:

Anne Bernays, Back Then: Two Literary Lives in 1950s New York

Pamela Painter, Fabrications, New and Selected Stories

Leslie Pietrzyk, Silver Girl, a novel

Steve Yarbrough, Stay Gone Days, a novel