The Limits to Retroactive Improvement (Patreon)
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Though Tenebroum gets most of the love and Golemancer and Death After Death get most of the hate when it comes to the things I write, the other day someone was kind enough to leave a 1.5 star on Ch. 7 of Tenebroum. This is the chapter where the Lich rises up and take the village. That struck me as odd of course, because most everyone really likes that chapter, but taking this spiteful form of feedback in hand I went back to see what could be improved on.
Of course, there were tons of corrections and improvements to be made. There usually are in my early chapters. But what struck me most was how much I loved the first half of the chapter (where the men just never come back,) and how dull the second half of the chapter seemed as I just glossed over the invasion in a few paragraphs.
You have to remember that at the time I wrote that chapter, Tenebroum was going to be a 20-chapter short, so I would have handled in quite a bit differently today. That led me to wonder of course - should I go back and edit that early section of the swamps life to flesh it out more when it was still spirit more than Lich? Should I have it watch a few of the townspeople and give them names to make the scene more impactful? I dropped the swap witch mini arc that I'd intended to use to expand on the spiritual nature of the world, but I could easily tie back in, if I wanted to add another 3-10 chapters to that portion of the story.
The question is - at what point does such work become self-defeating? I don't know, honestly. I plan on editing everything I write on RR/SH before I publish it in a final form one day, but I can't help but think of those retroactive edits that luminaries like Lucas and Spielberg did to their own work years later and wonder if the impulse to improve be more harmful than helpful in moments like these.
So what are your thoughts? Where are the weak points of this (and other) stories? Should I leave everything largely as it was in the first draft, or should I elaborate on the thin spots?