Thank you, fellow Authors.

[Carl East]

I've been around here now for over four and a half years, and I think it's safe to say that I've learnt a lot from some of the better Authors on this site. My writing has visibly improved, both in content and grammatically. I have 112 stories posted here, but some of them need to be corrected and even re-written.

I've known this for some time now, I just can't seem to motivate myself enough to do it. I've always believed that my Dream Reaper Series was a good tale, but it needs polishing. So how do you motivate yourselves to go back in time and wipe off the dust from some of your early stories?

Carl

 

[oggbashan]

Get a lecture from Tatelou on Discipline?

Og (who has the same problem with his earlier stories)

 

[Guest]

Get a lecture from Tatelou on Discipline?

Og (who has the same problem with his earlier stories)

I don't do good discipline, but I so love to receive it.

Carl, get strict with yourself. Go back to those earlier pieces with a detached eye. As much as possible, anyway.

Read them, be critical, cut out things that don't work, insert new things that do.

I've done this many times, with very old stuff and I've usually been very happy with the results. I end up with the bare bones of the initial story, completely fleshed out with new and improved writing.

Lou

EDIT, dammit! Such a perfectionist. I came back and edited, because I'd missed an "r" out of "earlier".

 

[lucky-E-leven]

I pored over this same question for quite some time until a very wise woman gave me her opinion on it. I trust her wholly and really took to heart her words.

Her advice: Leave them alone. Sure it's nice to go back and revise, revamp and restore old stories as your talent and knowledge increase. BUT they are also an invaluable resource when honing your craft. To be able to go back and see how far you've come from your first fledgling efforts is a marker. Use it to see what your major weaknesses were and compare your more recent work to them. See how you've improved and see what still needs work. Pat yourself on the back when you find you've mastered earlier problems and use that motivation to create an even better piece each time.

I'm a pretty objective person and was initially of the opinion that I could look at current works and see their faults, however when I went to do just that fell way short of the mark. The more I thought about it the more I found the wisdom in her words and though I want everything with my name on it to be as good as possible, I thrive on seeing the progress.

Just my tuppence. Forgive for any circular thoughts. It's very late (early) here.

~lucky

 

[oggbashan]

You can have your cake and eat it.

As Lucky suggests it is useful to keep your earlier work unamended as a reminder of how much you have developed and improved. That can be done by keeping an unamended copy.

You do not have to inflict your earlier imperfect work on the readers. You can revisit the story, revise and improve it with your new skills, and show how the story could be.

The originals are worth reading from time to time if you can stand the pain. Revising and improving them is more likely to benefit your writing than just looking at them.

Og

PS. I still have my first incomplete story not just at the point where I abandoned it as impossible to finish, but also the eighteen drafts that led to that decision. All 19 copies were stored on one 360k floppy as .txt files.

 

[Carl East]

Her advice: Leave them alone. Sure it's nice to go back and revise, revamp and restore old stories as your talent and knowledge increase. BUT they are also an invaluable resource when honing your craft. To be able to go back and see how far you've come from your first fledgling efforts is a marker. Use it to see what your major weaknesses were and compare your more recent work to them. See how you've improved and see what still needs work. Pat yourself on the back when you find you've mastered earlier problems and use that motivation to create an even better piece each time.



~lucky

I actually will be taking that advice on the whole, because I don't wish to mess with some of my earlier stories. They have a certain charm about them, that only I can appreciate.

However, there are stories that I've written such as 'Dream Reaper,' that were not only original when I wrote them, but still are today. I doubt you'd find any story on this site that compares, at least story wise. I'm also not sure how to approach a rewrite, should I just go through them from scratch and correct mistakes as I find them, or should I rewrite each chapter. One at a time?

Carl

 

[Guest]

You can have your cake and eat it.

As Lucky suggests it is useful to keep your earlier work unamended as a reminder of how much you have developed and improved. That can be done by keeping an unamended copy.

You do not have to inflict your earlier imperfect work on the readers. You can revisit the story, revise and improve it with your new skills, and show how the story could be.

The originals are worth reading from time to time if you can stand the pain. Revising and improving them is more likely to benefit your writing than just looking at them.

Og

PS. I still have my first incomplete story not just at the point where I abandoned it as impossible to finish, but also the eighteen drafts that led to that decision. All 19 copies were stored on one 360k floppy as .txt files.

Yep, exactly what Og said. That's exactly what I did and will continue to do.

I have the very first versions of all my stories saved into their own folder. I sometimes sit and have a laugh at some of the crap I wrote a while ago. The re-written versions are here at Lit, in the form of my Living The Fantasy series. I still see those stories as very flawed now, and I re-wrote most of them a year ago.

Lou

 

[Carl East]

Thanks OG, I was writing the reply above when you posted, otherwise I would've responded to you as well.

Carl

 

[Carl East]

Damn it Lou, stop it. Thanks for the advice, it's appreciated.

Carl

 

[lucky-E-leven]

I should've added this to clarify the bulk of her point to me.

Re-writing takes time and it is time I feel is better spent practicing the things I've learned verses fixing my old mistakes. The more I write, the more I learn of new tools and devices that inevitably destroy the mistakes I used to make.

I see the good in re-writing and am glad it has benefited others. But for me, at this particular time, it is counter-productive to growing as a writer.

Cool thread, Carl. I love to know what everyone else is thinking and how they see and do things.

~lucky

 

[oggbashan]

I still have my two earliest stories written in 1955 and published in my school's magazine.

They have put all the issues of the school magazine on the Old Boys' website so I can't forget the awfulness of those two stories.



Og

 

[Guest]

I should've added this to clarify the bulk of her point to me.

Re-writing takes time and it is time I feel is better spent practicing the things I've learned verses fixing my old mistakes. The more I write, the more I learn of new tools and devices that inevitably destroy the mistakes I used to make.

I see the good in re-writing and am glad it has benefited others. But for me, at this particular time, it is counter-productive to growing as a writer.

Cool thread, Carl. I love to know what everyone else is thinking and how they see and do things.

~lucky

I beg to differ here. I don't see it as wasting time, because in fact the editing process is as important (if not more so) than writing new material.

That's all re-writing old work is: editing. Especially when it comes to longer work; novels, chapters in a series and so on.

I've been editing my novel since I completed it in January. I'm now on the third cycle. I don't see going back to the beginning and re-writing it, as I see where it can be improved, as wasting time - it is tightening up the novel, making it better, moulding it to how I want it to be now.

It's exactly the same as going back over early stories. To me it's editing, which is also crucial to learn how to do well.

We are all different, though, and we all have our own way of working. That's just mine.

Lou

 

[Carl East]

I don't do good discipline, but I so love to receive it.

Carl, get strict with yourself. Go back to those earlier pieces with a detached eye. As much as possible, anyway.

Read them, be critical, cut out things that don't work, insert new things that do.

I've done this many times, with very old stuff and I've usually been very happy with the results. I end up with the bare bones of the initial story, completely fleshed out with new and improved writing.

Lou

EDIT, dammit! Such a perfectionist. I came back and edited, because I'd missed an "r" out of "earlier".

Well, I finally got around to tidying up my Dream Reaper series Lou. I just submitted it under the name 'The Dream Reaper: The Full Story.

I will be interested to see if by placing it all in one story, whether or not it will be read and voted upon this time. I have no idea how long it will take to come out, but I'll place a link here when it does.

Thx all.

Carl

 

[doormouse]

I took hours to edit all my early stories... submitted them as EDITED.. even made notes in the bottom box.

All were deleted without them changing my old stories for the edited versions.

The only one they resubmitted (after my third attempt), ended up as two stories in one. It's like they merged the old one with the edited one. I'm going to have to delete it now, which I really didn't want to do, because it's/was my best voting story.

Weird.

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

I had a similar debate when I wrote my first play. At the end of writing it (it took a year and a half) I was a completely different writer and the first act was painful to look at in some spots (gross continuity errors, bad phrasing, etc...). What I did was review it as it stood.

Essentially I left the framework in place, all the story elements and the phrasings that I liked and just did cleanup. I then rewrote sections that were "eh" to make them better. At the end, I had done a decent revamp, but I had not actually changed all that much. Chances are you'll find that by fixing a few of the blatant sections, your piece as a whole will simply sound better and possibly better than it would after a true revamping. Especially if you've lost the emotion that drove the original piece.

Also, don't be afraid to leave in unintentional themes. I've done that many a time, where a theme I did not intend suddenly appears in one of my works (it happens a lot in my plays for some reason). However, sometimes, those themes blend beautifully and have turned out later to be other people's favorite parts.

Oh, oh, oh. Very important. Get others to read your work and point out their favorite parts. One thing you don't want to do in a revision stage is to accidentally erase the best parts of your story because you didn't notice it.

That's my advice.

 

[Carl East]

Whilst going over the various chapters to 'The Dream Reaper' I soon realised just how often I'd over used comma's. What with that and how often my grammar left a lot to be desired, I feel I've come a long way in almost five years of writing.

I'm still not there yet though, if you know what I mean. I still feel I have a lot to learn. I think I'll place all my Hell's Gate series together next and finally finish that off.

Ok, I'm going in. lol

Carl

 

[ABSTRUSE]

This is so weird, I reread my stories last night and I can see how much I have changed.
Now I can look at my older works and say...whata piece of crap more objectively. However, I won't change them as they are what they are and now serve use as a learning tool.
I still have a ways to go, but I can see how far I've progressed.

I can also see how other authors here have changed and grown since they first posted. Somewhere along the line, we learned from one another, how cool is that?

~A~semi-hack writer.

 

[MichelleNJ]

Yes

Looking back on old stories is always fun

 

[Carl East]

I'll leave a link for anyone interested in seeing a work over of The Dream Reaper. I'd be interested to know how you feel about it. So far it's had four votes and all were fives, which indicates to me that it's worth a read at least.


Thx

Carl

http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=166792