When Revision Means Re-Envision

I've had an interesting morning.

This morning I took the twelve pages I wrote over the last two days on my new short story version of Fat Pat and the Accidental Death of Maryanne and threw them in the trash. Well, not literally in the trash, because they're still on my computer and still a saved file, but this morning I ignored them and started again with a brand new blank page.

I found myself wandering around yesterday dissatisfied with the way the story was going. I'd been writing it in third person and it wasn't working. I'd been stuffing too much information into the story and it wasn't working. Pat was turning into a good guy, a hard-done by guy and that wasn't working.

By the time I went to bed last night, I'd decided to start again with the story. I considered giving it up all together and going back to the novel I'm supposed to be working on, but that would have been giving up too soon. Instead I worked out a different way to tell the story, writing this time in first person and tackling it from a whole new (and hopefully more interesting) angle.

So that's what I did. When I sat down to work this morning, I didn't even open up the file with the old pages (all twelve of them!) in it. I simply cranked up a new page, set fingers to keyboard and started writing. It must have been the right decision because my daily goal of 2000 words, which usually takes around two hours to achieve, was completed this time in just a bit over an hour.

I still don't know if the story's going to work. I have other short stories sitting on my hard drive that I've abandoned because, for reasons I can't readily figure, they just don't 'work'. There's never a guarentee that a story will come together in a pleasing way, and I find this is doubly true for short stories. Short stories, especially considering their brevity, are hard work. Writing in such a compressed way is a real skill. To make a few pages say something interesting, surprising and true isn't easy. Hopefully it will be easier since old Fat Pat's story isn't going to be anything resembling literary fiction, but rather a pretty standard horror story. Then again, that's a form I'm not expecially experienced with so the whole thing is something of a challenge.

I'm going to keep going with it, however, even though there's a nasty little voice whispering in my ear telling me I'd be better off going back to my novel. Too bad though, that's one nasty little voice I'm not going to listen to. Maybe the story won't work out – but I'm not going to know for sure until it's done. Pushing yourself, extending yourself – well that's always a valuable process, no matter the end result.

Filed under: Writing Journal