The first night I stayed in my new place, I fell asleep trying to remember a book that was never written. I’d lived with that book once, waking and sleeping, for the better part of four years; between my eighteenth birthday and my twentieth wrote nearly thirty thousand words of it. Then some time later a different idea took hold of my imagination, and for more than a decade that was, more or less, that.

I don’t know what brought that unwritten book to mind. Some unlikely combination of sounds, scents, flavors; rain-wet spring air through the open window, the feel of a thin foam mattress on a hard floor. Probably I’ll never know.

But: ten computers and several versions of Word later, I still have the files. So last night I pulled them up, curious what this Moles kid might have written that could have made such an impression on me. Was there anything more than potential there? Was the book any good? Was he any good?

Well, he was no Meghan McCarron. He didn’t have much sense of character—his protagonist was a middle-class Everyman (Everyboy, really); his other characters could mostly be summed up in a word or two: the Girl, the Antihero, the Rival, the Father Figure, the Other Girl. His dialogue was occasionally good, occasionally over the top, often banal. His plots took a few twists and turns, but they were complications, not reversals. He had trouble with pacing, trouble figuring out which parts of a scene were unnecessary, where exposition was needed and where it could be dispensed with.

But he also had a flair for description, when there was an image worth describing; the beginnings of an individual style, built on a rhythm of short phrases and simple adjectives. He had an ear for made-up languages and specialized vocabularies. His invented mythology took the 80s’ medieval preoccupations and complicated them with 90s concerns like modernization, ethnic cleansing, religious apocalypse, cutting up and reassembling familiar tropes in ways that wouldn’t be completely foreign to readers of Steph Swainston or Jeff VanderMeer. His fight scenes weren’t half bad.

If I ran into him in a workshop, what would I say? You’ve got potential, kid—certainly. I could give him some advice on where to cut, how to decide which scenes to write and which to skip over. I could suggest that he dispense with some of the more florid ‘legends’ and ‘ancient texts’. I could point him to some useful reference books.

The deeper flaws, though—mainly they’re just the natural consequence of being a well-traveled but sheltered and introverted nineteen, having your talent outstrip your experience, knowing more about history and mythology than about how the world works and how people think and behave. I look back and I think my instinct—that if I’d finished that book when I was twenty, I could have sold it, but that it’s just as well that I didn’t—is the right one. The better part of a decade passed between when I stopped working on it and when I finished and sold my first short story, and I don’t think any of those years were wasted.

On the other hand, there are things about that Moles kid’s writing that I miss: the broad canvas, the obsessive worldbuilding, the reaching after high tragedy. The lack of pretension, and the un-self-consciousness of his imagination.

I have to put that unfinished book down again, now; I’ve got other things to do. But maybe when those things are done I’ll pick it up again. It would be a gift, of sorts; an homage, even. There are a handful of writers without whose influence I couldn’t have become the writer I am today, and that kid is one of them.