What Happened To My First Three Books

 When "The Secret History" came out in 1992, I read it.  Then, I threw out about a dozen 3M 3.5-inch data disks containing three books I'd been working on for about ten years.  Tartt's work was so clear, powerful, and self-assured that I felt there was no point in trying to make anything of the confused assembled scribbles I was working on.  

I was already a little nervous about Beth Henly being from Jackson and just eleven years older than I was.  Tartt was six months younger than me and from a house just a few streets over from my cousin Robert in Greenwood.  Did the world really want to hear from an over-privileged white boy of my generation when there were so much clearer and more interesting voices to choose from?  Then "The Help" came out from Kathryn Stockett, who's just six years younger than me and from the same neighborhood.  I'd visited her Grandfather often, who mainly only wanted to talk about my namesake, who was his peer.  

After that, this writing thing, I figured, just wasn't for me.  I was surrounded by it.  It was in the air I breathed, but they were so good, and I was barely able to read books with chapters before I was thirteen, and even now, without computers, it's very difficult for me to put a sentence together properly.  

The creative process, I learned, was wrought with self-doubt.  If it's not, you're probably an asshole, and eventually, it will show in your work.  Comparing my work to others isn't fruitful or helpful.  My goal is not to compete with someone else's work but to get these ideas in my head down on paper so they'll leave me alone.  

The ideas I was working on when I threw those disks away are still inside me.  They probably will be until I make something of them.  I don't feel like anything was lost.  I just had a tantrum because I was scared.  That happens sometimes.  It happens to me a lot.  I'm learning that if I tell people I'm working on something, I can't destroy it in secret when I have moments of self-doubt or frustration that my vision hasn't focused itself yet.  It's a little trick to keep me disciplined and hopefully prompt me to keep moving forward, even when the doubts start to creep in.