How can I edit my own, very old work?
I have about a hundred pages of a novel I wrote in high school, I like the concept behind the writing but I'm finding it extremely difficult to go back and read/edit it again. I last edited the document in 2007.
The work received lots of praise at the time but, as I look back and read it myself, it's embarrassing. At the same time I'm attached and want to finish it. I'm concerned with how much work editing it all would be and that makes me afraid I will never finish it.
I'm thinking of three ways of handling this:
- Throw the old copy in the trash and completely rewrite it. I hesitate to do this because the amount of work was already intimidating; if I do this I think I might abandon the project.
- Read and edit page by page, fixing all the little things I don't like. This feels logical but I don't know if it's the best approach.
- Read the whole thing over once like a new reader before I start considering edits.
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3 answers
It's good that you're embarrassed by it, that scrutiny will help you. I'm in a similar situation with a novel I wrote but I haven't let it gather enough dust to view it with fresh eyes...
I would suggest you open it up and read through the whole thing with a red marker pen, tear it apart like a college proffessor- with the cynicism of a publisher. Reflect on your self-criticism for a while and then undergo a massive rewrite; using your old draft as a guide (keeping whatever you like and what you feel works and trashing the rest)
Good luck my man
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Don't throw it away, re-read it. If you don't like it that much when you re-read it, stow it away for a couple of years. During this time you might try taking the concept and re-writing it with a different viewpoint character and a fresh setting. That will give you another manuscript to work with down the road. It may end up being the novel you want it to be. Or it may not. Or it may need to be stowed away for a number of years before re-reading. Write a couple of novels between your current reading of the first novel you wrote, and the next reading. So: say it's now 2017 and you've written another 120,000 words between when you read your first novel and stowed it away. NOW re-read it. You'll be a different person and able to see it with new eyes. I recently re-read a novel I wrote in 2007. I'd re-read it a couple of times in the intervening years and I always thought there was something there but I couldn't quite see what was crap and what was worth keeping.And a lot of it felt too confessional. I read it again with a friend a few months ago (it's 2015 now), and we workshopped it, and now I'm very clear that there's a LOT in it worth keeping, and I have an idea for an entirely different story I'm writing around it (expanding it from 50,000 to 90,000-100,000 words or so). The context I'm adding makes the previous writing even more interesting than it was before. So keep in mind: lots of writing improves over time, and even if it seems awful to you when you read it at 5 years, another 5 could make all the difference in terms of making it clear whether it's usable or not. And in the meantime: write. Write, write, write, write, write.
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There are three aspects to consider:
- The plot
- The characters
- The writing
If you want to know if the project is worth pursuing at all, read the entire thing from scratch. Furthermore, read it and try to pretend you aren't the author. Now:
- Do you like it? Do you like the premise? When you're done, do you want to know what happens next?
- Do you like the characters? Do you care for the people you've been reading about? Do you understand them? Do they feel real?
- Do you like how it's written? For the most part, does the prose work?
If you enjoyed the story as a story, and not as your story, then it's worth fixing.
If you hate the construction (the writing), break it back down into an outline, save the few sparkling sentences, throw it out, and start over. Yes, it will be a lot of work. If writing were easy, people would take up poetry for a summer job instead of flipping burgers at McDonald's.
If you don't like the plot, write up detailed studies of your characters and find something else for them to do. Throw out this book and write a different one.
If you don't like the characters, figure out what the original purpose of the story was and tell it some other way.
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