Rewriting - the hack and slash approach.
So I promised myself that I would make space for writing in my life again, but I'm not always in the mood to really write something fresh. Instead I've decided to revise my older stuff when I'm too tired to write something new. Started revising my second Lyric Wheel story today, 'Sometimes We Believe' (the very first one won't get revised but will be left unchanged as a monument to my very humble beginnings as a fanfic writer). Well, it's certainly an interesting experience because 'revising' mainly seems to consist of cutting stuff out for now. It's 12 pages long at the moment, but I expect it will be a lot shorter by the time I'm done.
I think partly this is just the lazy way to revise - don't think too long about a sentence that bothers you; cut it out. On the other hand I have this tendency to remove stuff from earlier drafts all the time, and the tendency has only gotten more pronounced recently. I can't tell you how many pages I removed from 'Normal', all told. And I think 'Normal' is all the better for it, even if I do feel a certain nostalgia for certain missing sentences or paragraphs. But, even if you're utterly in love with a certain sentence - if it doesn't work in the place or for the character you used it for: get rid of it. Keep it for some other story if you must, but don't leave it where it only hinders the flow or results in OOCness.
Also... I'm not sure that, considering how old this story is and how much I have changed since then, I should be doing anything more invasive than editing it a bit. Sure, there are bits I would write completely differently now. But the story is part of my own writing history, and I don't want to falsify that too much. I don't really want to turn it into a different story than it was intended to be at the time.
I think partly this is just the lazy way to revise - don't think too long about a sentence that bothers you; cut it out. On the other hand I have this tendency to remove stuff from earlier drafts all the time, and the tendency has only gotten more pronounced recently. I can't tell you how many pages I removed from 'Normal', all told. And I think 'Normal' is all the better for it, even if I do feel a certain nostalgia for certain missing sentences or paragraphs. But, even if you're utterly in love with a certain sentence - if it doesn't work in the place or for the character you used it for: get rid of it. Keep it for some other story if you must, but don't leave it where it only hinders the flow or results in OOCness.
Also... I'm not sure that, considering how old this story is and how much I have changed since then, I should be doing anything more invasive than editing it a bit. Sure, there are bits I would write completely differently now. But the story is part of my own writing history, and I don't want to falsify that too much. I don't really want to turn it into a different story than it was intended to be at the time.