WRITING: Exploratory Surgery

Better known in its simple form as editing, the reading back and changing of one’s own work can be an almost never-ending operation.

For the latest issue of otto, I completed a project that started out a year ago with a concept of tying together a few short stories, in this case four, via characters and words that would "link" back to each other to form a "whole" of mixed time and space point of views.  While I discarded for the time being my original grouping of stories, I resurrected one I’d written for a class at the Wesleyan Writers Conference last summer and along with two paragraphs of a story I had sitting on my hard drive, a recent post here in Spinning, and one story started from scratch, I rewrote each. With the basic characters in mind, their past became clear.  Once I got to understand them a bit better, their present became a question of the decisions they had made decades prior.  It was an interesting and fun thing to write, and along with the technical decisions of where links would be applied, it was a great learning experience.

As I read them now in published form, I see how time would have given me the chance to better position the actors.  Each story could have been more complete within itself, and the links in particular could have been much better planned out to provide a more thoughtful pattern of life going off in different directions.  I am still finding errors in the writing, and finding much more powerful ways that the links could have been used.  There was no time to even allow any reader input, as all four stories and the links needed to be finished to present the project as a whole.

But the big push for deadline got the stories written, and the realization that my original choices were just (to me) too good to rush through may have produced far less than what I wanted it to be.  But the groundwork for the concept has been laid out and it will be easier and far more professionally and creatively worked on for the next experiment.