The first thing Maren Lund shows me when I visit her apartment in Northeast Portland is not the published novel. It is a shoebox.
The box is battered, its edges soft from years of handling. Inside: three hundred index cards, each one covered in her cramped, slanting handwriting. Some are color-coded with faded sticky tabs—blue for the 1987 timeline, yellow for the subplot about the brother, red for scenes she never could get right. A handful have been torn in half and taped back together, as if she changed her mind about changing her mind.
Twelve years of work live in this box. The novel they were meant to produce does not exist. Lund abandoned the manuscript in 2024, after her agent read the latest draft and said, gently, what agents say when they cannot sell a book: I think this might need to sit.
What struck me, looking through those cards, was not the loss. It was the strange, uncomfortable recognition that the cards themselves told a story—her story, the story of a woman trying to build something she could not quite see—and that this story felt more alive, more searching, more honest than anything in the four hundred pages she had ultimately walked away from.
The Margin as a Private Stage
Lund is fifty-three. She published one novel, in 2015, with a small press in Seattle. Kind reviews. Modest sales. The second novel—the one in the shoebox—was supposed to be bigger, more ambitious, the book that justified the first. Instead, it became the book that nearly broke her.
When I ask her to describe what the index cards contain, she pauses for a long time.
“They contain the book I was actually writing,” she says. “The novel was the version I thought I was supposed to be writing. The cards were the version I couldn’t stop writing.”
She pulls one out at random. It reads: Chapter 14—why does she go back? Not because she loves him. Because she’s afraid of what she’ll become if she leaves. This is the real book. The novel doesn’t know it yet.
That last sentence sits in my chest for a moment. The novel doesn’t know it yet. How many writers carry that kind of private knowledge—awareness of what the book is really about—while the public draft plods along in a different direction? The margin, the notebook, the index card: these are the places where the writer speaks to herself without the pressure of a reader’s judgment. Where the thinking happens, not the presenting.
Institutional creative writing programs have long recognized this distinction. The Purdue University OWL, in its creative writing pedagogy resources, treats invention and early-stage generative work as distinct, valued components of the writing process—not merely preliminary steps toward a finished product, but phases with their own intellectual and artistic significance. The assumption built into the academic framework is that a writer’s process materials carry meaning that deserves study, not just disposal. And yet, in the broader literary culture, we rarely behave as though that is true. We review the book. We interview the author about the book. The index cards go into a shoebox, and the shoebox goes into a closet.
The Grief of Discarding Years
Lund did not throw the cards away. She almost did. The week after her agent’s call, she carried the shoebox to the recycling bin outside her building and stood there for ten minutes. Then she carried it back upstairs.
“I couldn’t do it,” she says. “Not because I thought I’d go back to the novel. I knew I wouldn’t. But the cards felt like evidence that I had been alive for those twelve years. That I had been thinking. Throwing them away felt like saying none of it had happened.”
The grief of abandoning a long project does not get much attention in the literary world. We talk about rejection—the form letter, the agent who ghosted, the contest shortlist that didn’t include you. But the deliberate abandonment of something you spent a decade on, the conscious decision to stop—that is a quieter loss, and harder to name. It is not failure, exactly. Lund’s novel was not rejected by every publisher; it simply never became the book it needed to be. She kept revising, and the revisions kept moving the book further from the thing that had drawn her to the idea in the first place.
“I kept sanding off the parts that were alive,” she says, “until what was left was smooth and correct and dead.”
The cards, by contrast, are not smooth. They contradict themselves. A character’s motivation shifts from one card to the next. A scene that appears in three different versions across four years of notes ends up cut from the manuscript entirely. The brother subplot—those yellow-tabbed cards—was the section Lund loved most, and it was the first thing her early readers told her to remove. She did. She has never forgiven herself for it, and she knows that. The cards know it too.
What the Process Artifact Holds That the Book Cannot
There is a question that has been bothering me since I first looked through the shoebox: do the notes deserve an audience?
Not the novel. The notes. The crossed-out paragraphs, the margin arguments with herself, the character sketches that never made it off the index card. Is there a reader for this material—not a scholar, not a biographer, but a reader who wants the emotional experience of watching a writer think?
Lund is not sure. “Part of me thinks the notes are only alive because they’re private,” she says. “The moment someone reads them, they become a performance. And I don’t want to perform my confusion.”
But another part of her has begun to wonder whether the notes are, in some sense, the real book—not the novel she failed to finish, but the record of a mind trying to understand something it could not quite reach. The cards contain questions the novel never asked. They contain the brother subplot, intact and breathing. They contain the admission, scrawled on the back of a card from 2019, that Lund did not know how to end the book because she did not want to leave the world she had built.
“That card,” she says, “is the truest thing I wrote in twelve years. And no one will ever read it.”
She says this with something that is not quite regret. Closer to relief. The privacy of the notes is what makes them honest. The moment they become public, they become another version of the performance the novel already was.
The Tension Between Two Selves
Every writer who has spent years on a project knows the tension Lund is describing. There is the private self who writes in the margins, who argues with the draft, who knows the character is lying when the scene says she is telling the truth. And there is the public self who presents a finished book—a book that has been shaped by editorial notes, by workshop feedback, by the writer’s own anxious sense of what a novel is supposed to do.
The private self is the more interesting one. But the private self cannot publish. Or can it?
The Authors Guild, in its updated best practices for writers navigating artificial intelligence, emphasizes that a writer’s original voice, thinking, and creativity are what make them the writer they are—and that protecting those qualities is a professional and ethical priority. The guidelines reflect a broader anxiety in the writing community: that something essential about authorship, something tied to the private thinking self, could be lost or diluted when the process of writing becomes indistinguishable from the process of producing. The Guild’s framing—voice, thinking, creativity—describes exactly what lives in Lund’s shoebox. Not polished prose. Not a marketable product. Thinking.
The tension between the private creative self and the public-facing authorial product is not new. What is new, perhaps, is the growing awareness among writers that the private self’s output—the notes, the drafts, the abandoned attempts—might have its own value, its own integrity, even its own claim on a reader’s attention. Not as a supplement to the published book, but as something separate. Something that tells a different story.
Organizing the Conditional Layer
Lund’s index card system is not elegant. She knows this. The cards are not filed in any logical order; they are filed in the order she wrote them, which means the 2017 cards sit behind the 2021 cards, and the ones she tore and taped are wedged between scenes that no longer exist in any draft. When she wanted to find a specific note, she would flip through the entire box. Sometimes she found what she was looking for. Sometimes she found something she had forgotten writing, and the forgotten thing would send the novel in a new direction, and the new direction would eventually be revised away.
For writers who work this way—and there are more of them than workshop culture acknowledges—the challenge is not generating material. It is keeping the generative chaos legible enough to return to. The raw conditional layer of a working draft—those notes that say maybe this, or maybe the opposite, or maybe neither—needs some form of organization to remain useful without being flattened into the false coherence of an outline. Lund’s shoebox preserved the chaos but made it difficult to navigate. Other writers use spreadsheets, Scrivener corkboards, legal pads stacked on a desk, voice memos on a phone. Each method carries its own tradeoff between fidelity to the mess and the ability to find what matters.
Some writers have begun turning to tools that sit between the analog and the computational—not to replace the generative chaos but to make it searchable, traceable, retrievable without forcing it into a structure it resists. An AI writing software environment that preserves the conditional layer of a working draft can serve this function: it lets a writer hold the messy, contradictory, exploratory material in a form that does not demand resolution, while still making it possible to find the note that matters at two in the morning when the scene is not working. The point is not to clean up the thinking. The point is to keep it accessible enough that the writer can return to it without losing the raw quality that made it worth keeping.
Lund has not digitized her cards. She is not sure she wants to. “The box is physical,” she says. “I can hold it. The weight of it means something. If it were a file on my computer, I think I would forget it was there.”
I understand this. But I also think about the writers who do not have a shoebox, whose notes are scattered across five notebooks and three devices and a folder of screenshots, and who will lose the conditional layer of their own thinking simply because they cannot find it again. The preservation of process material is not a romantic concern. It is a practical one. If the notes are where the real thinking happens, then losing the notes means losing the record of who the writer was.
The Question of an Audience
I want to return to the question I asked earlier, because it does not leave me alone: do the notes deserve a reader?
Lund and I talk about this for an hour. She is wary. “The notes are a diary,” she says. “You wouldn’t publish someone’s diary without their permission. And I’m the someone. I don’t give myself permission.”
But she also acknowledges that the cards contain something the published novel—one she is proud of, one she stands behind—does not. The cards contain doubt. They contain the moments when she did not know what she was doing, when she wrote a scene three different ways because she could not tell which one was true. The novel, by contrast, presents decisions. It says: this is what happened, this is why, this is what it meant. The cards say: I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe this.
“Readers don’t want my doubt,” she says. “They want the book. The book is the thing I made out of the doubt. That’s what a book is.”
She is probably right. And yet I think of the readers I know—the ones in my book club, the ones who write to me after interviews, the ones who say they want to understand how a book was made, not just what it says—and I think many of them would recognize themselves in Lund’s index cards. Not because they are writers, but because they are people who have spent years on something they were not sure of, who have private records of their own confusion, who know what it is to sand off the alive parts in service of something presentable.
The cards are not a novel. They are not a memoir. They are not a craft essay. They are something else: a record of a mind at work, with all the contradictions and false starts and sudden clarities that work entails. Whether that record deserves an audience is a question I cannot answer. But I can say that holding those cards, reading them, feeling the torn edges where Lund changed her mind and then changed it back, was one of the most moving literary experiences I have had in fifteen years of doing this work. Not because the writing was beautiful. Because it was true.
What Remains
Lund has started writing again. Not the novel—not that novel. Something shorter, something she describes as “a thing I don’t have a name for yet.” She is not using index cards. She is using a notebook, a single notebook, and she is writing in it without the pressure of a system.
“The shoebox taught me something,” she says. “It taught me that the thinking was the thing. The novel was the byproduct. I had it backwards for twelve years.”
She does not plan to publish the cards. She does not plan to throw them away. They sit on a shelf in her office, next to a copy of her published novel and a photograph of her mother, who died in 2020, and to whom the abandoned book was, in some way she cannot fully articulate, dedicated.
“The dedication was never in the novel,” she says. “It was on a card. Card number two-seventeen. I knew I wouldn’t finish the book, I think, before I admitted it to myself. But I wrote the dedication anyway. That was the real thing. The rest was trying.”
I leave her apartment carrying the image of that card—a dedication to a dead mother, written in the margins of a book that would never exist, preserved in a shoebox that no one was supposed to open. And I think about what Lund said: the thinking was the thing. Maybe the notes are not more interesting than the novel. Maybe they are simply a different kind of interesting—one that does not ask to be published, only to be acknowledged as real. As work. As a life spent trying to understand something that could not be understood, and writing it down anyway, in the margins, where no one was watching.
That, I think, is what every book hides. And it is what we almost never get to see.
