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Shrodinger stories
Oct. 6th, 2010 01:48 amSome people advise beginning writers to move on from their "trunk stories" - those written long ago, lying unsold in metaphorically dusty files on your computer. The Crap Fairies* have probably been at them like a horde of marauding moths. The old stories are obsolete, dead, journeyman exercises in the craft. Move on, the advice goes, to new ideas, to better-written stories.
Not me. My dusty files have stories decades old. They're all alive, and when I'm in the mood, I take them out and revise them, saving every new version. Playing with possibilities is one of the delights of writing. The story's setting changes. The main characters change nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, appearance, personality. The story's voice changes, and so do tense and person and length. Each of my stories has a multiple existence, going back years. (I think the max right now is 22 versions.)
Most of all, endings change. At Clarion, instructor Greg Frost proposed an interesting exercise. Write an ending to your story. Now put it away, and write a different one. Then another. And another. The first one, he suggested, is seldom the best one - because it's likely to be the most obvious. It's only when you force yourself to consider other endings that you fully explore the logic of the story.
Until it's sold, a story balances on the edge of many possibilities.
As they're published -- sometimes 20+ years after the first draft -- they crystallize. Their worlds, their people, and what becomes of them, are no longer indeterminate. Their secret alternate selves exist only in my files.
[*Crap Fairies: I think my friend Kater Cheek invented the term. They mess around with your old stories so when you re-read them you wonder how you wrote such crap...]
Not me. My dusty files have stories decades old. They're all alive, and when I'm in the mood, I take them out and revise them, saving every new version. Playing with possibilities is one of the delights of writing. The story's setting changes. The main characters change nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, appearance, personality. The story's voice changes, and so do tense and person and length. Each of my stories has a multiple existence, going back years. (I think the max right now is 22 versions.)
Most of all, endings change. At Clarion, instructor Greg Frost proposed an interesting exercise. Write an ending to your story. Now put it away, and write a different one. Then another. And another. The first one, he suggested, is seldom the best one - because it's likely to be the most obvious. It's only when you force yourself to consider other endings that you fully explore the logic of the story.
Until it's sold, a story balances on the edge of many possibilities.
As they're published -- sometimes 20+ years after the first draft -- they crystallize. Their worlds, their people, and what becomes of them, are no longer indeterminate. Their secret alternate selves exist only in my files.
[*Crap Fairies: I think my friend Kater Cheek invented the term. They mess around with your old stories so when you re-read them you wonder how you wrote such crap...]
