Ramblings: On Editing and Rewriting (Patreon)

As part of posting the first half of chapter 6 of Constant in All Other Things, I finally took the step to looking back over the older chapters and editing them.

It's something I ought to have done ages ago but kept putting off.  Some chapters I hadn't looked at since first publishing them. I also rediscovered bigger edits I'd made four or five years ago, during one of my earlier attempts at getting back into writing.  The expanded scene where David reached Amanda Lang first is one of those, for example.

Returning to these old chapters has been both exciting and exhausting. Exhausting, because I've skimmed through about 70k words of old writing, seeking out a lot of the inconsistencies that've cropped up as I've written new chapters.  Now that I've (finally!) written a concrete timeline for both David's life and for the novel's plot, it's easier to clean up earlier details.  Hopefully without it being too conspicuous, I've dropped in little timestamp details--a January wind here, a winter sun there--to tie old and future chapters closer together.  I've also tidied up timeline details: David is now consistently 39, for example.  

Other details were tedious find/replace jobs: swapping ever "Sanders" for "Saunders", hunting down "Long" to swap in "Bellamy" and then changing "Mom" for "Auntie" in the chapter leading up the Asklepios Clinic.  (Since later chapters establish that the real Cindy's parents died in a car crash, having "Mom" along for the ride seemed incongrous, a rooky mistake a hunting AI might discover.)  

Along side all this, I tried to squeese in a few more Sci-fi details, without overdoing it.  I reckon I'll beef up the setting during the final-final edit, but that's still some time away.

Mostly, I tried to suppress my instinct to make major changes.  Re-reading my old writing from the vantage point of nearly--dear God, two decades!--was fascinating.  I could've almost been reading somebody else's work. Especially in those earliest chapters, and especially chapter one, which feels very... rough; and in my memory, I did dash it off quick quickly.

In fact, one thing that jumped out at me was just how--quick--these early chapters are.  Most of them are under 10k words.  Chapters 1 through 7 add up to something shorter than the second Interlude, for example.  Yet across those chapters I managed to introduce the plot and main characters, move them from the court room to a safe house, via a road trip to the Clinic, and squeese in some classic TG tropes.

Which is why I've been reluctant to make major changes this time through.  I can see, from about chapter four onwards, nuggets of what I think become my "style"--to the extent I can be said to have one--slowly emerging: a descriptive paragraph here, some introspection there.  But otherwise, it all clips along at a good pace.

And clearly, people liked it!  There was something in this first season of Constant that drew readers in, and I don't want to accidentally wipe that out through over-editing.

Some of the change between the earlier chapters and what I'm writing now is deliberate.  I can clearly remember struggling with David's inner voice when I first started.  At times i wanted to write him in a slow, more considerate way, with less swearing and so on. But I also wanted to... soften? deepen?... that voice over time, so that by the time we were deep into the second season, the transition into his more--feminine?--voice felt gradual and natural.  

Of course, there's also nearly twenty years between chapter one and the chapter I'm currently working on. I've changed; my life has changed; and clearly, the way I write has changed.  Is it better? Have I gotten better?  I think so, but I also feel I might have lost some of the vitality of those early chapters, some of the speed and pacing. I've just revisited chapter 8 and CIndy's first date with Harry Longman.  It passes in a blink--a reported scene rather an shown--and it works fine, that way. Today, I think I would've succumbed to the temptation to write it out in detail.

One thing I've enjoyed is rediscovering the hints of both the real-world me in those earlier chapters, and hints to plotting I'd forgotten along the way.  For example, I can recognize some of the settings David mentions from places in my past. For example, The Snug, a pub he mentions, was based on a place where I used to drink.  In terms of plot, I was pleased to find setups for things I'm developing now; and some I'd forgotten, like Muna Khalid and her father's connection to NeoPharm. Some I was sad to see I let slip--I need to find a way to return to K's story of Steven, the ex who abused her and how she got rid of him.

Finally--and apologies for the ramble--it's my first experience with whole-novel editing.  Though it's only a preliminary edit, just enough to harmonize names and times so that I can post this to TGStorytime, it's my first experience with reading a whole, long story through with an eye on picking out details for development, cutting or correction. It's exhausting, but also rewarding.

In the meantime, enjoy the revised posts on TGStorytime.  Constant is doing well there--it's just 14.5k aggregate views as of writing this--and I've just completed the revision of chapter 8.  I'm consider a -few- major edits, mainly shifting the start of "series two" to the end of "series on", but otherwise the first "novel" of Constant is more or less nearly done. I think the edits to Constant 2 will be harder, mostly because individual chapters are much longer, and also because I've never liked the first chapter. I'd already had a go at rewriting it once, years ago, and now I'll have to commit to fixing it properly.

My end-of-week update probably won't have much to offer this week. I think polishing off this edit will consume my writing time for the week.  I've been lucky that some unexpected time opened up over the weekend, but the work-week ahead is looking frightningly busy. Hopefully, I'll at least managed to get the editing done, and maybe a little bit of current chapter 6.  We'll see.