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It’s in the edit


It’s true I missed a couple of days, but I’m keeping the self-imposition going in other ways. Yesterday I posted the first of what will be a series of rewrites of old short stories over on Medium, and it got me thinking about editing, rewriting, and how we change over time.

The story’s not a million miles from the original. The plot (such as it is) stays the same, the characters, large parts of the text. It must be a good ten years old though, and reading it I could tell. It was an accurate reflection of my character at the time, the newer version, clearly, is closer to the current version of me, and the older me is more restrained, which is only to be expected.

The question is, which is the better? Is it truer to leave well alone? Well, no, clearly. The whole thing reads better now, it’s tighter, makes a little more sense, and has trimmed away a couple of the twentysomething approaches which now read as gauche. “Kill your darlings” as Stephen King said, and he was right, I remember the guy who wrote that story, I remember why he wrote it but he doesn’t feel like me any more (the original will live on over on OSS, though, to remind me).
So yes, it’s in the edit, with life as with writing. The joy of writing is I can’t go back and edit the time, but I can work with what came from it.

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