Writing: Letting a story sit · 7:21pm Dec 20th, 2013
This is one small example of why I like to let a story sit for a few weeks at least before publishing it.
There’s a paragraph in Alicorn Cider that explains a little bit of why Big Mac loves Twilight. (There probably should be more.) When I published the story, it went like this:
She was looking at everything and everypony with eyes as bright and wide as those of a foal seeing its first snow. The feeling that everything was full of potential and mystery began to rub off on Mac, as it always did when she was around. As he watched her take it all in he became aware of the Ponyville smell of sawdust and bread, the flower in the waiter’s vest pocket, and how the sun scored a shining white line down Flat Top’s barberpole as it spun.
I wanted to say how Twilight looks at everything as if it were new, all the time, because she knows there’s always something more there to understand, that even a square foot of bare earth harbors secrets, even after you’ve stared at it for half an hour. “Full of potential and mystery” is too vague. It doesn’t communicate that this is a scientific kind of wonder. You could use the same lines to describe Derpy in her fanon “dim-witted but enthusiastic” incarnation.
But I didn’t have it in me at the time to fix that description. When I don’t have it in me, I look at the line and have a little nagging doubt, but convince myself that it’s okay. To fix it, or even to recognize that it needs fixing, I have to look at it when my mind isn’t occupied with the plot, or when I’m less tired, or the moon is in the right phase, or something. So to finish revising a story, I have to run it by many different versions of myself, separated from each other by time and random events, until each part is seen by some version of myself who has it in him to deal with it.
This morning I reviewed the story for no particular reason, and I realized I needed to explain that the sense of mystery and magic Twilight perceives is due to understanding things, to contrast that with how most people imagine that understanding diminishes mystery because they have never fully experienced either, and to explain how the feeling of a big mystery connects with the final sentence that gives minute sensory details. Now it says this:
She was looking at everything and everypony with eyes as bright and wide as those of a foal seeing its first snow. But not from ignorance. She saw deep into everything and everypony she looked at, he knew, to their inner workings, and somehow that made it all more magical and mysterious for her than it was for the ponies who’d learn a thing’s name and think they knew it. The feeling of wonder at the necessity of each little thing, and the bigness of them all together, began to rub off on Mac, as it always did when she was around. As he watched her take it all in he became aware of the Ponyville smell of sawdust and bread, the flower in the waiter’s vest pocket, and how the sun scored a shining white line down Flat Top’s barberpole as it spun.
Sometimes going over a story leads to me making a bigger change, but that happens less often, and would have taken a longer explanation.
(I should probably do the same thing with blog posts, but I usually don't.)
Oh man, I do this a lot more often nowadays. I can leave a story to sit for weeks, go back to it later and think "What the hell was I on when I wrote this?" Though I find going through the entire story with repeated rewrites makes it dull, usually leading me to over-thinking the entire piece repeatedly. I try to find the right mix of rewrites and going through a story to get it just right.
The real question though is figuring out how long a story needs to sit before it's ready. That's still something I'm trying to figure out.
This is something that's particularly on my mind right now. I'm trying to do up a Hearth's Warming story, but it's taking a good chunk of time to write, since I can only work on it around dealing with other time commitments. I'm already pretty much positive it's going to be late, relative to when I wanted to finish it. But how long do I sit on the thing for editing purposes, given that it'll get further out of season with every day it waits?
That's not quite an actual question, and it's not quite rhetorical. Obviously it sits as long as it has to before it's good enough that I'm cool with posting it. However long that is. But it's a subject that's on my mind of late, yes.
1628567 Readiness = 1 / (1 + e^(-time))
1628678
The logistic function of time? Don't you find that answer a little... derivative?
1628715 This is the first time I have wanted to vote a comment both up and down.
I recently went back and changed some of the wording in part of a story I posted here in 2011. I've got on my mind another change to that story, to smooth out the cathartic moment.
Letting the work age is crucial when you're editing it yourself, because editing needs to be done by a different person than the writing. You can either hand it over to someone else, or you can wait long enough that you've forgotten what you were thinking while you were writing. One way or another, though, someone who doesn't intimately know what the author was thinking needs to go over the piece.
One of the nice things about a medium like FimFiction is that your writing is never dead. I rather wish there was a revision history, though--I haven't kept intermediate copies, so I don't even remember some of what I've changed anymore.
I feel like you could get rid of these two sentences without losing any of the meaning. As it is, it feels like you're shoveling words into my eyes. To say that Twilight isn't wide-eyed at the ordinary out of ignorance is redundant. To say that ponies no longer consider a thing mysterious when they think they know it is a given. All you really wanted to do was explain Big Mac's beliefs of how Twilight sees things, and the subsequent sentence does that and more.