Scrolling Twitter (take that, Elon! --- despite your exasperated pleas, it’s Twitter and always will be) the other day, someone wondered whether ‘twas a good and noble thing to rewrite a novel later… like, much later. They were commenting on something author Neil Gaiman said: “When people ask if I'd change anything about a book I've already written, I want to explain to them I'm not the person who wrote that book any longer, and even if I tried right now I'd write a different one. Everything you make as a writer is a combination of what you want to say and who you are at the time you are telling that story.”
Well, perish the thought little ol’ unfamous me has the unmitigated gall to contradict famous (or infamous, though discussing the allegations against him is outside this epistle’s scope) Neil … but that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Let me start by telling you a story.
My father, God rest his soul, was one helluva talented artist. In his native England during the Second World War, he was a technical illustrator for Rolls Royce, crafting intricate drawings of aircraft systems --- some of his hand-drawn lettering is so small, it requires a magnifying glass to read the lettering… which is perfectly legible under magnification. And after emigrating from the UK in the 1950s, he plied his trade as a commercial artist during the day, churning out any and all kinds of artwork for the small printing and production company he worked at for the next 31 years. During his leisure time, he painted stunning watercolours and acrylics of Western prairie grain elevators and train stations and houses and barns, oh my. He was gifted with an amazingly precise brushstroke and sense of scale.
One of said paintings was a two-story ranch house sitting on a hill. In the autumn. Just after harvest time. Mountains in the far background. Lovely, lovely painting. He framed it and it worthily hung in the living room for many years. When he passed away, my sister and I divvied up his artwork, and one of the paintings I got was the ranch house. Sad to say, it had fallen on hard times: somewhere along the way, dad cannibalized the glass from the frame for some other project, and then, in his early 90s, decided to revise the painting. He added a fence in the foreground, with a garish ‘For Sale’ sign on it, then painted a similarly garish figure on the house’s veranda. It looked awful. Totally destroyed the lovely warm harvest tones of the painting… and his artistic skills were, unfortunately, not what they had been decades previously. I don’t know what he was thinking.
Eventually, after much reflection and plenty of qualms, I decided to revise the revision. I painstakingly removed figure and For Sale sign, bringing the painting back to what it had been, reframed it, and it once more is displayed with pride. What right did I have to revise the creator’s vision? Well, in this case, I viewed it as a restoration, not a revision. Is that splitting hairs? Maybe. But rightly or wrongly, I felt the revision would improve the overall work.
Now looking at revision on the personal literary front… way back in 2015, I self-published my first novel, Gryphon’s Heir. It did moderately well as far as self-published works go, but inexplicably, did not make me the next Suzanne Collins or J.K. Rowling. Nonetheless, I set to work on the sequel, and wrote as time allowed… which increased appreciably after retirement in 2019. Then, of course, in 2020, Covid appeared, and the world stopped. Which didn’t impact my writing time… but something strange happened: a new protagonist abruptly appeared in my mind --- a 19-year-old girl, of all people --- and demanded I write her tale. Now. Sequel be damned. So I did. (Didn’t really have a great deal of choice, TBH.)
Her name’s Areellan, and her initial behaviour was entirely in keeping with her personality, I found: she’s scrappy, impatient, and takes no bullshit. I like her a lot.
Problem was, after finishing Areellan’s book --- her first book, if you please, because the story’s definitely not finished, though she hasn’t yet revealed what happens next --- I looked at my writing and had a major epiphany: it had improved in nine years. Markedly. Now, I know what you’re thinking: that’s a damned silly observation to make. After all, if your craft --- whatever it is --- doesn’t improve over nine years, you’ve got big problems. But still…
I decided to withdraw Gryphon’s Heir from circulation and rewrite it. Which I did. Didn’t alter the plot, just cleaned things up, writing-wise. Well, with one major exception: taking a page (screenshot) from the video games I play, I added an episode into the storyline. (Video games call this DLC --- short for downloadable content. After a game is published, the developers often later put out a self-contained episode which ties into the tale without altering the primary plotline. It adds to the story, and more importantly from their viewpoint, generates money.) So now, we have a new-and-improved Gryphon’s Heir (and its sequel, to which I applied the same treatment) which contains more story, yet is shorter and cleaner than the original. And I have three novels which I consider state of the art. Well, my art.
So… getting back to Neil’s (rather pedantic) assertion: true, I’m not the same person who wrote Gryphon’s Heir lo, those many years ago. But it’s the same story… just better expressed, and with an interesting ‘side quest’ added. How is that not a win? (Though Peter Jackson will undoubtedly cut it when he does the film version of my novel, because, like Tom Bombadil or the scouring of the Shire, it ‘doesn’t advance the plot.’ But as I’ve discussed before, I think that’s a fallacy too many writers fall into nowadays: “if it isn’t absolutely integral to advancing the plot, it’s gotta go.” No, no, no, folks: Stephen King rightfully argues such bits of ‘chrome’ --- his term --- are what takes a story from bare bones and fleshes it out.)
The crux of the matter is, I don’t think we need to get into existential debates about how we’re different people now than we were back when the tale was originally written; that’s a given. At least, I hope it is. The more relevant discussion is whether what we’re creating is a better work.
Which I did. IMHO, of course.
Well, perish the thought little ol’ unfamous me has the unmitigated gall to contradict famous (or infamous, though discussing the allegations against him is outside this epistle’s scope) Neil … but that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Let me start by telling you a story.
My father, God rest his soul, was one helluva talented artist. In his native England during the Second World War, he was a technical illustrator for Rolls Royce, crafting intricate drawings of aircraft systems --- some of his hand-drawn lettering is so small, it requires a magnifying glass to read the lettering… which is perfectly legible under magnification. And after emigrating from the UK in the 1950s, he plied his trade as a commercial artist during the day, churning out any and all kinds of artwork for the small printing and production company he worked at for the next 31 years. During his leisure time, he painted stunning watercolours and acrylics of Western prairie grain elevators and train stations and houses and barns, oh my. He was gifted with an amazingly precise brushstroke and sense of scale.
One of said paintings was a two-story ranch house sitting on a hill. In the autumn. Just after harvest time. Mountains in the far background. Lovely, lovely painting. He framed it and it worthily hung in the living room for many years. When he passed away, my sister and I divvied up his artwork, and one of the paintings I got was the ranch house. Sad to say, it had fallen on hard times: somewhere along the way, dad cannibalized the glass from the frame for some other project, and then, in his early 90s, decided to revise the painting. He added a fence in the foreground, with a garish ‘For Sale’ sign on it, then painted a similarly garish figure on the house’s veranda. It looked awful. Totally destroyed the lovely warm harvest tones of the painting… and his artistic skills were, unfortunately, not what they had been decades previously. I don’t know what he was thinking.
Eventually, after much reflection and plenty of qualms, I decided to revise the revision. I painstakingly removed figure and For Sale sign, bringing the painting back to what it had been, reframed it, and it once more is displayed with pride. What right did I have to revise the creator’s vision? Well, in this case, I viewed it as a restoration, not a revision. Is that splitting hairs? Maybe. But rightly or wrongly, I felt the revision would improve the overall work.
Now looking at revision on the personal literary front… way back in 2015, I self-published my first novel, Gryphon’s Heir. It did moderately well as far as self-published works go, but inexplicably, did not make me the next Suzanne Collins or J.K. Rowling. Nonetheless, I set to work on the sequel, and wrote as time allowed… which increased appreciably after retirement in 2019. Then, of course, in 2020, Covid appeared, and the world stopped. Which didn’t impact my writing time… but something strange happened: a new protagonist abruptly appeared in my mind --- a 19-year-old girl, of all people --- and demanded I write her tale. Now. Sequel be damned. So I did. (Didn’t really have a great deal of choice, TBH.)
Her name’s Areellan, and her initial behaviour was entirely in keeping with her personality, I found: she’s scrappy, impatient, and takes no bullshit. I like her a lot.
Problem was, after finishing Areellan’s book --- her first book, if you please, because the story’s definitely not finished, though she hasn’t yet revealed what happens next --- I looked at my writing and had a major epiphany: it had improved in nine years. Markedly. Now, I know what you’re thinking: that’s a damned silly observation to make. After all, if your craft --- whatever it is --- doesn’t improve over nine years, you’ve got big problems. But still…
I decided to withdraw Gryphon’s Heir from circulation and rewrite it. Which I did. Didn’t alter the plot, just cleaned things up, writing-wise. Well, with one major exception: taking a page (screenshot) from the video games I play, I added an episode into the storyline. (Video games call this DLC --- short for downloadable content. After a game is published, the developers often later put out a self-contained episode which ties into the tale without altering the primary plotline. It adds to the story, and more importantly from their viewpoint, generates money.) So now, we have a new-and-improved Gryphon’s Heir (and its sequel, to which I applied the same treatment) which contains more story, yet is shorter and cleaner than the original. And I have three novels which I consider state of the art. Well, my art.
So… getting back to Neil’s (rather pedantic) assertion: true, I’m not the same person who wrote Gryphon’s Heir lo, those many years ago. But it’s the same story… just better expressed, and with an interesting ‘side quest’ added. How is that not a win? (Though Peter Jackson will undoubtedly cut it when he does the film version of my novel, because, like Tom Bombadil or the scouring of the Shire, it ‘doesn’t advance the plot.’ But as I’ve discussed before, I think that’s a fallacy too many writers fall into nowadays: “if it isn’t absolutely integral to advancing the plot, it’s gotta go.” No, no, no, folks: Stephen King rightfully argues such bits of ‘chrome’ --- his term --- are what takes a story from bare bones and fleshes it out.)
The crux of the matter is, I don’t think we need to get into existential debates about how we’re different people now than we were back when the tale was originally written; that’s a given. At least, I hope it is. The more relevant discussion is whether what we’re creating is a better work.
Which I did. IMHO, of course.
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