Finding before/after examples where writing has been improved, to learn from
I'd like to see a series of example paragraphs, showing before/after a rewrite, to give me specific examples of how writing can be improved.
Is there anywhere that shows such things? I once read the biography of James Herriot, where they showed part of the first story he ever wrote, and you could see how poor it was compared to the final version eventually achieved.
I found this very intruging, and wondered if I could learn from more examples like that. So many changes cannot be explained easily, or defined by rules, and an example is needed to illustrate how things can be improved.
I spotted an example on this website just a moment ago too - the original example paragraph was slightly reworded in one of the answers: nameless-main-character
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Orson Scott Card gives a great example of 4 drafts for the opening of Ender's Shadow, explaining as he goes why each draft isn't what he wants. Sounds like exactly what you're looking for - you can read it here.
Another excellent resource is Janet Reid's Query Shark. It's a huge trove of critiqued revisions - not of fiction, but of queries to an agent, describing the book. That might not be exactly what you're looking for, but she gives advice and individual critiques on revising sales pitches - which include a fair share of flavor text - for hundreds of queries. If it's revision you'd like to learn, that would be an excellent place to start.
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If you go through the twelve slush books which Christopher Tolkien assembled from his father's writings (collectively called The History of Middle-Earth), you can see practically line-for-line how JRRTolkien created, edited, and shaped the LOTR trilogy.
There are multiple drafts, stories which hopscotch from version A to C and back to B ending up in version D which was typeset as E but then finished by his secretary as C-Prime plus F... At any rate, I can hardly think of a larger example of vivisected prose.
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Several blogs demonstrate before/after (or at least detailed line-edits on early drafts).
- Evil Editor often does it for query letters.
- Edittorrent covers all sorts of topics, and the archives have lots of before/after examples.
- Miss Snark no longer blogs, but her archives have many good examples.
One of my favorite writing books, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, shows before/after examples.
I find before/after examples most useful on small examples, sentences, paragraphs, maybe a page or two. Beyond that, it's too hard to see the correlation.
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