Making Big Changes is Hard!

As I embark on what is probably the largest editing effort of my life, I've started realizing just how titanic the task is. Do you get too attached to your stories? It's not hard to do. After all, we pour our life's blood into these things. We sweat and worry and cry over them. We coax them out of the deepest part of ourselves and teach them how to walk on their own. They really can become like our children.

All of that, however, doesn't change the fact that we have to change them. We have to hack, slash, and disfigure our stories to make them good. But it's so difficult when we're so emotionally invested! It's been said before in different forms, but I do think it's true that while writing is a "hot" activity, something that happens right from the sizzling skillet of our most passionate emotions, editing must be an entirely "cold" activity, something that comes purely from our most objective sense of reason and logic. Really successful writers have to be both passionate artists and rational scientists.

After the jump: the difficulty in making those big changes.

So I'm staring down a story that I wrote over six months ago, a story I worked hard on and that got a really good reception when it first appeared in a workshop. My professor loved it; I successfully submitted it to a literary magazine and got it accepted for publication in its current form.

Now that I'm including it in my senior thesis, however, it needs a major makeover. Part of my evaluation will be my ability to revise, to take a piece that has a strong backbone and really make it completely new, completely improved. My professor will not be impressed if I just fix the typos and hand it in as is. I never expected it would be so difficult to go back and really rearrange this thing. Perhaps I'm feeling resistant because it's had success -- it's actually good enough to be published, after all! But I know it could be still better, and I owe it to the story to finish the job.

In the coming weeks, I'll be forced to confront this story and give it the treatment it deserves. It needs at least one completely new scene and a revamped ending. I can imagine writing the new scenes, but the ending! It seemed so perfect! I loved it! It's my darling! I'm not ready yet to part with it. Perhaps with the addition of those scenes, the ending can survive. Right now, it's still my darling. I'll keep my readers updated with my thesis work, and what happens.

Comments

[Emmet Ryan]

In essence you have to take 'kill the baby' approach to it, in that you need to be able to accept that while you might love certain parts of your story that in the grand scheme of things these parts may detract from the overall tale being told. That's the hard part of editing, removing the parts which although individually interesting detract from the overall product.