One Of These Days

I had an interesting thing happen to me the other day. Right now I am taking a fiction workshop with Craig Lesley. Lesley is an Oregon author, and has published a handful of acclaimed novels. He is an excellent teacher, and I have had him a few times before. I workshopped a story on tuesday, and on thursday morning I was rushing to leave the house before class and I was digging through my backpack looking for the story we were going to be workshopping. I came a across a piece of paper that had a few sentences on it written in Craig's handwriting. At first I thought that it was a sheet with extra comments on my story, but then I read it. It was a few sentences of a scene from something he is currently working on. I recognized some of the characters in the piece, there were three characters mentioned in five sentences, from his first novel Winterkill. He said at the beginning of the class that he is working on a new novel with those old characters, and this piece of paper was part of it. I had a dilemma on my hands. He had given me the paper by accident, so it was a safe bet that he didn't know I had it. If his new novel, a hand written piece of which I had, were to win the Pulitzer and Craig went on the be a Nobel Prize winner, then it was possible that the piece of paper I had could be worth millions. On the other hand this might have been a very important short little scene and he might be looking frantically for it. I've heard, and believe that its true, that if you lose something that you write it is almost impossible to recreate it exactly. In the end I decided to return the paper to Craig after class. He was grateful for it. When I told Bobby about it, he said I should have made a photocopy and given that to Craig, keeping the original for myself. Lizzy brought up an interesting point too, though, that the piece of paper was an insight into Craig's process. Process for a writer can sometimes be very personal, and it was pretty cool to see something in progress from a professional writer. I know that some day I will look back on this incident and think that I let a gold mine slip through my fingers. But I hope that if something like that were to happen to me, if I gave a note on an unfinished book to one of my students by accident, that they would do the same thing that I did. I guess that sometimes ethics are more important than millions.