Some writers refer to their unpublishable work as “trunk novels” or “trunk stories.” For my broken stories, I kill them and then send them to my virtual morgue, which is a folder on my computer.

So what qualifies as a dying story in my book?

Honestly, I think that the decision to kill a story is a personal one that should be left up to each individual writer. Only you can decide whether or not your broken stories can be fixed. (Of course, I’m talking about the stories we write before we submit them to an editor or publication.)

Sometimes, the stories that I kill are heavy on characterization and have little to no plot. A couple of times, I’ve killed stories intentionally after I’ve written them, like my “warm up” stories that flex my fiction writing muscles, or my more experimental works. There was also one story that I killed because of the way it was structured; I felt it would have made a better screenplay than a narrative.

It sucks sending stories to my morgue, but I feel that it’s all part of being a writer. No writer sits down at a keyboard every day and tells excellent stories every time they type. Writing, like learning how to sing or play piano, requires regular practice to keep those skills sharp. Sometimes, your performances will be awesome. Sometimes, they won’t. When they’re not, I review them to see if they’re salvageable. If I feel they cannot be fixed, then I commit them to my morgue, grieve for a few minutes and then start writing the next one.

The good news is that I still use what I’ve created by reviewing interesting concepts or taking pieces of characters or prose that I like. (I literally looting the corpses. Hah!) After all, getting the words onto my screen is only half the battle, because sometimes a page of words doesn’t make a great story, no matter how many times I revise it.

And that, dear readers, is why I have a morgue.