Do you ‘ship’ your writing?
Steve Jobs famously told Apple developers that they must ship, i.e. deliver their work. Creatives can easily get lost in their art and fail to ship it, usually due to an inability to accept the endeavour as complete and ready to share with the world.
Whether or not you ship your writing is up to you, though. In fact, you really don’t have to publish it. Writing for yourself is perfectly valid. As Henry Miller said, ‘Writing is its own reward.’
But if you do ship your writing… well, then may I suggest that you leave it at sea?
The glorious Satisfaction of re-editing
Back in 2016, Stephenie Meyer published Life and Death, a reimagining of her bestselling book Twilight.
In her foreword, the author breaks down the changes she made in the new version of her book. Only a small proportion of the revisions were in line with rewriting Twilight with gender-swapped characters (which was the point of the exercise). All of the rest of the changes were down to the author re-editing her book ten years since its publication, to fix perceived mistakes and inconsistencies and add in elements she’d dreamt up in the last decade. She writes:
70% of the changes I made were because I was allowed to do a new editing run ten years later. I got to fix every word that has bothered me since the book was printed, and it was glorious. [Author’s emphasis]
I can imagine how she felt. I’ve been there. I wrote my Ceruleans series a decade ago, and it’s imperfect (as all writing is), and in the years that have passed since its publication, I have itched to re-edit it – rewrite it, actually, in places.
In those ten years, I’ve grown a lot as a writer, and I see so much in the books I would do differently (or not at all), and it would be glorious to tweak and tinker and ‘fix’.
But I recognise that, for me, it may be glorious, but it would also be damaging.
The Large, Prickly stick
I care about the writing I’ve done in my life. But I care more about the writing to come. I need to write more stories and poems and books. And I know that re-editing past works would hold me back.
As writers, we’re all capable of looking at a past work and pulling it to pieces. But in doing so, we’re looking backwards, not forwards; we’re pulling a piece of art out of the time to which it belongs.
We’re beating our younger writer self with a large, prickly stick.
Would re-editing Death Wish help me to write the next book and the next? Or would essentially criticising my younger writer self dent my confidence in writing and keep me stuck?
If you write something knowing that in the future you’ll come back and pull it apart, how do you find the courage to finish it? To ship it?
Does re-editing really help you in your writing journey?
respecting THEN-you
When we re-edit, we’re confident that we’re improving a work. We take all the knowledge and skill we’ve developed since we wrote the work and bring it to bear on the writing. That sentence would read better this way; this word is better than that one.
But we’re coming to the writing from the outside, from a distance; we’re no longer in the writing. We risk damaging what we wrote while we were in the flow.
An example: I was reformatting my novels for print, and while checking the proofs, it caught my eye that I’d repeated a sentence across two chapters in Forget Me Not. Tutting – annoyed with myself for such sloppiness – I removed the second sentence and smoothed the text to allow for the deletion.
Then I slept on that edit. And when I woke up the next morning, I was uncomfortable. Something felt wrong.
I went back to the manuscript. I read both chapters in full. I realised the repetition was deliberate, done for literary effect, and in removing the second sentence, I’d weakened the writing, not improved it.
I reinstated the sentence and gave myself a stern talking-to. Now-me didn’t know better than then-me.
One person’s treasure
You read your past writing and you see flaws. But what if the parts you don’t like, one person’s ‘trash’, are another person’s treasure?
Sometimes, what a writer sees as a weakness is a thing of beauty to a reader. I wonder how ardent Twilight fans (of which, at the time, there were many) felt about the author’s edits in Life and Death? Some, presumably, adored every original word.
The truth is, when you mess with art too much, you can mess it up. Over-editing can destroy what was unique and beautiful in the writing.
leaving your writing at sea
I’ve been a professional book editor for more than 20 years. It’s my job to edit, edit, edit. So resisting the urge to edit my past writing is hard.
But I know that re-editing doesn’t help me write new works and grow as a writer. And it’s joyless.
So I’m doing my utmost to ship my (imperfect) works and leave them at sea. Could you do the same?
And on the subject of perfection, I will leave you with this from Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way:
Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough – that we should try again.
