Jul 182012
At last, I’m almost done editing the novella I called “Morning Star,” and it was a painful process. I wrote it about five years ago, in response to a prompt I found on the Internet. I was convinced the resulting story was one of the best things I had ever written. I tried to get it published, and when that failed, I set it aside with the intent of editing it again sometime in the future.
Now, five years later, I went back to it warily, knowing there were many things about it that had to be worked on. I can say one thing in its favor–thanks to “Morning Star,” there is no doubt left in my mind that my writing skills have improved.
You can fall into a trap of thinking of editing as a calm procedure during which you re-live your story, fix some typos, and maybe catch an embarrassing plot hole that hadn’t occurred to you before. This was not that sort of editing. Oh, there were traces of it, and it’s not like the entire story needed to be scrapped. On the other hand, every paragraph needed something done to it. Some just had awkward phrasing. Some were written in such a juvenile fashion that I cringed. Some had to be rewritten entirely, because the existing section was just a bad plot element.
The good news is that that story is now one step closer to being publishable. Editing it wasn’t fun, but it was necessary.
Update: Since then, I’ve looked at Morning Star and realized that I can only save it if I scrap it and start all over. For stories that fared much better, check out my fiction publications.
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