Revamping a Very Old Story
aka: In Which Teenage Me Weeps In Angst
Once Upon a Time
When I went off to college, Steven and I used to write letters to each other.
One of his letters contained a couple paragraphs of story and was accompanied by a note saying he thought it’d be fun for us to work on something together. My reply took the first two lines of his first paragraph and turned it into two chapters of story. (Note: he’d intended that I add on to the end. We’ve had our fair share of miscommunication.)
We spent years polishing the world. We made maps, came up with cultures and societies and species. Every once in a while, we even came up with characters, and ONCE we even made a plot! (gasp)
We called that world Taven, and it was our first shared love.
Now
Over a decade later, I finally feel prepared to start writing those stories.
Unfortunately, teenage me wasn’t a very good writer. Current-day me has written novels and short stories and webserials and gone through writing classes and learned to read critically …
The stories and characters I had so carefully laid out are falling apart under more advanced scrutiny.
Good and Bad
This is good! Better that it fall apart now, before writing begins, than halfway through the book.
But at the same time, I feel like I’m losing something precious.
Questions
“Why does …?” we ask, and we need to do more worldbuilding.
“What if …?” we ask, and suddenly we’ve wiped entire beloved characters from the face of the novels, and the leaning jenga-tower of our plot crashes down around our ears.
“If that’s true, then … ”
“When does …”
“If we don’t have that, then we don’t need this, which means …”
Hard
It’s hard. Harder than it should be, even knowing that it’s necessary.
Harder than building something new up from scratch because we spent ten years, waiting for the day when we’d start writing these stories as novels to share with other people.
The only thing I can compare it to is when I was a kid and I realized I had to stop carrying around my beloved Littlefoot stuffed animal, because I wasn’t a baby any more.
Better
The final books will be better than what teenage-me had planned. Teenage-me didn’t understand plot arcs or pacing or promises or stakes. Teenage-me hadn’t read enough books to recognize a tired trope when I saw one.
Loose planning, for a “some day” book is easy and fun. It’s daydreaming and fingerpainting and jangling the keys on a piano.
Now’s the time for actual planning.
You
Anyone else with me?
Anyone out there have a long-cherished story, only to find that you needed to cut out some lovely bits in order for the whole story to thrive?
15 Comments
Awwwww *Massive hugs*
Yes and yes and yes. Sympathy in droves and endless supplies of shoulder to lean on and ears to talk off. Yes, I completely knows what this is like. Little known fact Storyweaver was also a revamp from a very old, very, very clique story I wrote when I was about sixteen. Even though I knew it wasn’t good, I still loved it and always wanted to rewrite it. When I saw the chance I took it, but it was hard. Hard to change it and demolish the characters and burn it down to build the new story from its ashes.
The new version doesn’t look like the old at all, but there are ghosts, little nuggets I keep for myself which let me honor the original without diminished the new version. I am sure, you will do the same with your Taven story. Those little nuggets, more for you than anyone else, will help with the pain of change.
“honor the original” Yes, yes, a thousand times this. As always, you find the perfect phrase.
It’s statistically proven that revamping an old concept is 47.2 times harder than just starting a new project from scratch.
Except I’ve never dealt with that frustration.
To be honest, all of my older ideas, when I think about making them workable now, with the greater critical thinking experience I’ve garnered, they all seem irreparable.
Completely flat characters accompanied by incomprehensible systems of magic and hilariously weak plotlines leaves NOTHING to be salvaged from the wreckage.
I hope to write a longer piece eventually but in the meantime, I’m using the shorter ones to see if I can get a better handle on motivations and plotting.
And the stuff I’ve dumped into the trash…I mean, I was completely in love with the idea at the time, and there’s a ghost of that intensity still there when I bring it up to consider redoing it but in my case, it’s more akin to shooting a pet pony that broke its leg >.>
Better to put poor Buttercup out of her misery and do it with love.
It’s only working/racing horses that usually have to be put down for a broken leg. Pet ponies are perfectly capable of surviving.
Just sayin’. =]
I rarely have plots. I usually have fun characters and magic sparks though, and those need to be rescued at all costs.
*eyes you warily
*Cocks shotgun.
MY LEGS ARE NOT BROKEN.
Norm I equine, more’s the pity.
I’ve been going through this a lot in the last few months. About ten years ago, I started (with the help of my ex-wife) developing a world that I would use both for my D&D games and for my future novels. Recently, I finally put a good portion of it into action for a D&D group, and I’ve had to completely destroy the world I’ve spent the last decade working on, and rebuild it from the bare bones.
Only names survived. Nothing else. XD
*hands you the comforting beverage of your choice* Ouch, ouch, ouch. I feel your pain.
/sympathy
In high school, I dreamed of another world. I called it the Other Side, and about 1/7 of my dreams took me there. The landscape, the characters, the buildings of this place were always the same, though time passed there between my ‘visits’. It was like having your own private Narnia. Other Side dreams were lucid. I knew I was dreaming, that I’d made it to the Other Side. I could go where I wanted to, explore places I hadn’t been able to reach last visit. See what happened to the people I’d left behind in the previous dream.
There were paths through the woods that, I was sure, led to Lothlorian — if only I could follow them. But they grew fainter as I traveled them until the road slipped out of my fingers and I was dumped into a ‘normal’ dream. There was a free-standing gate in the midst of a ruined city with an inscription that read, “I am the gate to all worlds, I am the key to all doors.” I never could get that portal to open, though I tried every chance I got.
I still have some of the diaries and maps I made of that ‘world.’
Those dreams spawned a score of my ‘dead ideas’, stories and novels that died. Maybe some day I’ll dust them off and give it a real shot.
wow. That totally sounds like a book I’d read, yes it does.
That reminds me a lot of HP Lovecraft.
ie, I think it sounds wonderful =)
I sometimes think those dreams were my answer to “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”! I had just discovered Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith when they began. Their strongest theme was that there was something more, something even deeper and further ‘into’ dream, that I couldn’t reach. Yet.
Like Brad-O said in another thread, this is one of the few ‘inspirations’ that has stuck with me over the years. Which is probably a sign that there’s something worth mining in there, some day.
I haven’t gotten there yet. None of my stories are old enough to revamp. I’m still the teenage-me, still plugging away in blissful ignorance of the falling-apart that is to come…
While it’s tempting to read this and think that any work I’m doing now is useless because in a few years I’ll have grown and I’ll look back and revamp or abandon, I know that’s silly because it’s the writing/struggling/thinking/planning/dreaming that I’m doing now which will lead to the growth and the change :)
@Faith – the work you are doing now is certainly NOT useless, because it is taking you to the better writer you will be in the future. I’m similar to you, in fact, despite being more than twice your age, because I just started writing. I’m trying to finish my first-ever novel and I’m deathly afraid of finding out that it’s crap when I’m done!
Keep plugging along – you’ll develop as a writer as you keep moving forward.
Will do. Taking it one day at a time…