Writing exercise-revisiting an old story.

[lovecraft68]

I was invited to be part of a Halloween anthology with some other authors who use the same publisher. Issue is the only story I have that would fit the theme, and be short enough to fall under word limit is from back in 2012.

Knowing anything I wrote back then has some seriously bad grammar and other issues, I decided to go back and give it an edit to not embarrass myself(more than usual)

The story "A mother's Love Never Dies" is here, but I'm not bothering with the free lit version, this is the SW version which had already been tweaked somewhat, but still a wreck.

But as I undertook this, I was struck by how this-if you have the time-is a great exercise to see how far you've come from then until now.

Some things I found and corrected.

Ellipsis-I abused this so badly during dialogue to try to show nerves or hesitancy in an awkward conversation that the reader must have thought my characters had speech impediments.

I still didn't have the dialogue tags consistently right, an issue I still have on the fly, but know how to correct them all now during an edit.

Word count, started at 14,500, got it down to 13,413 by eliminating not just sentences here and there, but entire paragraphs of "what's the point here?"

Fixed a slew of was issues "she was wearing" to She wore as an example

Way too many "started, starting, began, beginning," example "She started running her fingers through my hair" to "She ran her fingers through my hair.

As an aside, the long gone JBJ taught me that issue when he looked over a story for me. He may have been a troll, but he was far more helpful than people gave him credit for.

The issue of what I call repeating myself. "she rose up, she knelt down" rose and knelt are all that's needed, you don't rise down or kneel up. She stood up...stood is fine, "she rose to her feet" where else do you rise to if you were sitting?"

Little things like that help word count as well as just being more concise.

There's other things, but you get the point.

On the positive side, the story is better than I remember it, I expected it to suck just because I hadn't been writing long at the time. The dialogue flowed well, the characters were consistent, and the romance angle worked better than I'd remembered as well.

The end result is I can see I'm far better at grammar and technical writing than I used to be, and also was pleased to discover that when it came to story telling, I was way better back then than I gave myself credit for.

Again, something worth doing if you have the time, and want to see where you are as opposed to where you were.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I've done that several times, but I didn't just correct or revise the grammar and wording. I changed the plots too. All of these were less than three years old. I either published the new ones on other sites or, in a couple of cases, posted them here with new titles. No one noticed or cared that the old versions were still up.

One big thing I did was change role play stories into real events. It seemed better to have the plots actually happening rather than just have people pretending to do them.

In another case, I had a story where about an unlikely couple where they don't get together. One reader complained, "It was like a car race and the lead car just dies." I decided he was right, and I rewrote it so that they did get together. I eventually made a series about their strange relationship. (The series is not on here.) I recently added a couple of new chapters.

 

[lovecraft68]

I do this often. The two actual stories I have up here I first wrote about five or six years ago. I have probably a hundred more I can go through to clean up. Though, some of those will never see the light of day due to how violent they are. (Based on dreams I had, which often get violent in a horror movie kind of way.)

I often pull entire pages from a story that I decide would work better in a different story upon revision.

Oh, man, I want to read the violent stories.

You can put those here, unless there's a snuff element, there's usually not an issue, especially in Erotic horror. I used to have some real nasty stuff up here before I pulled them to extend and publish as novels.

 

[lovecraft68]

Two involve serial killers and one involves a certain type of "I Spit on Your Grave" style revenge minus the nonconsent aspect, but with a family history among gods and goddesses and their offspring (adult offspring). I know one is considered snuff because I tried to upload it here last year, lol.

Big props for the ISOYG homage, that movie had a strong effect on me. Course I saw it when I was 12 thanks to an older cousin who had it on VHS as Day of the Woman.

My Abigail novel has a tribute to it, but with the rape revenge motif.

That's a powerful, and disturbing movie. The remakes were awful, they changed the tone of the rape from being something you should be appalled over to all but glorifying it, they did the same in the Last House on the Left remake.

 

[NotWise]

My two oldest stories here were published before I understood much need for editing. I've revisited and edited my copies of both stories, but I haven't bothered to upload the edited versions.

The stories I wrote for my pre-Lit self are worse.

 

[lovecraft68]

My two oldest stories here were published before I understood much need for editing. I've revisited and edited my copies of both stories, but I haven't bothered to upload the edited versions.

The stories I wrote for my pre-Lit self are worse.

I have a folder from my first stories back in 2008 two years before I published here. They are horrific, as in no apostrophe in thats horrific. More "your" instead of "you're" than you'd want to imagine, even a lot of i not capped.

Last time I looked at those all I could think of was the woman from Game of Thrones yelling "Shame, Shame!"

 

[MillieDynamite]

writing is a process, we get better the more we learn and write. With that, it helps to read, read, and read some more of writers that are really good.

 

[SimonDoom]

I haven't done this, but I should try it. I feel like I've gotten better over the course of writing 41 stories (I would hope so), but it's hard to tell from things like comments, favorites, scores, etc. The second story I published is still my highest rated story. But I could probably make it a much better, and sexier, story, if I rewrote it. I probably won't, though. I prefer to focus on my new stories, and there's a huge back log of those.

 

[HeyAll]

For the last few years I've gone back and re-edited my old stories. Mostly to get rid of past typos and to update the writing quality. It's not a good feeling to think someone's introduction to my work could be a piece of trash.

Also, the stories end up getting shorter, not longer.

Sometimes I cringe at some old parts of my writing. But other times I'm impressed with what I wrote.

 

[lovecraft68]

The first time I saw it was part of a group watch with a bunch of guy friends. None of us were comfortable, but my avid cheering of Jennifer towards the end, I think, made them much more uncomfortable than me.

They definitely butchered the remakes of those, most horror remakes are a butchering of the original with few exceptions, but I can often still enjoy them as trash flicks

In this particular story, the half-human child of a Goddess gets revenge on the God that murdered and practically enslaved her mother by agreeing to take her mother's place as his lover centuries later. She successfully gets him to believe her and, in the process of consummating an illegitimate marriage, she brutally murders him with the same cruelty he showed her mother.

Yes, funny little double standard that women can be gangraped and its okay, but let a guy get castrated and its "oh, no!"

My revenge scene is so over the top violent a guy in my author's association who beta read for me said he hadn't seen anything that nasty since Ketchum's Offseason, I took it as high praise

 

[lovecraft68]

I haven't done this, but I should try it. I feel like I've gotten better over the course of writing 41 stories (I would hope so), but it's hard to tell from things like comments, favorites, scores, etc. The second story I published is still my highest rated story. But I could probably make it a much better, and sexier, story, if I rewrote it. I probably won't, though. I prefer to focus on my new stories, and there's a huge back log of those.

I think that's why its worth doing in the sense that for a variety of reasons score and stats here aren't great indicators as far as whether the story is technically well written or not.

For example, the one I just did is a solid 4.71 and I think-now-that its a mess. And looking through the comments quickly, there's 81 not reading them all, this gem for a few months back

Anonymous4 months ago
ok, but...

typos, misspellings, malapropisms, and just bad grammar, even for lit/´murrican english.

that said, i still enjoyed it.

don´t think there´s hope for you, you can´t go back to middle school, you´re too old to learn.

please keep writing nonetheless.


First, Irony...guy's ragging on my and didn't cap "i" so there.

Also, I didn't quit school until High School, okay there, pal?

But that remark "you're too old to learn" is something that did motivate me to work hard to get better. It wasn't this comment itself, but my own mindset as even before I dropped out English was never my strong suit and I picked up writing at 40 and it was a challenge to try and knock the dust off the brain and get the drive to prove people like that-and myself wrong.

This exercise proves they're wrong.