Will That Story REALLY Return? Critiques, Rewrites, and the Next Thing · 9:28am Jun 17th, 2021
In April, I made this blog post: "Where That Story Went Today."
After a newly posted story of mine was analyzed and critiqued in considerable detail by an especially skilled writer whose thoughts I took (and still take) seriously, I unpublished the story while it was still very new.
In my April blog post, I said I planned to do a thorough rewrite and post the rewritten version. That WAS my plan. That still MIGHT happen...someday...maybe? But there's another possibility, too.
I think sometimes the advantage of having a high quality critique of a seriously flawed story isn't merely that one can thoroughly rewrite the story, but also that one can learn from the experience, and write one's next story, or the story after that, differently. The story I blogged about in April is an extreme case: to be relatively happy with it, I would have to rewrite it from the ground up AND lengthen it by maybe 2x or 3x...maybe even more. From my perspective, most of what would be left from the old story would be the knowledge and ideas I gained from the experience.
That's why I've been writing other stories, instead of jumping into a rewrite of that particular old story.
When I write good stories, that's one of the ways I write them. And THAT'S why in the long description for a story I wrote later in April, "Thirty Minutes Or Less: Scenes From an Emigration Center", I credit two prereaders who preread two other stories, not "Thirty Minutes Or Less." 
On the other hand, I'm unlikely to make a habit of deleting a story just because someone doesn't like it. Critiques and criticisms happen in many ways, and you can't please everyone. When someone wants something very different from what I want, I can't get what I want by just doing everything they tell me to do.
