It’s August 5th and that means IWSG day! So happy insecurity bashing day to you all, and if you’d like to give the group a follow yourself you can find them here.
Our lovely co-hosts for this month are Shannon Lawrence, Diedre Knight, Liza, and Pat Garcia!
And the (optional) question to spark the conversations this month: As a writer/author what is something you regret? Or something that you wish you’d done differently in your writing process?
Chaos. This question is pure chaos. I admire the IWSG this month for just throwing that match into a combustible pile of insecure materials.
Who among us has not IMMEDIATELY WISHED to change something with our books. And by ‘immediately wished’ I mean ‘seconds after hitting that publish button’. And by ‘something’ I, of course, mean ‘everything I read after the book has already been published and it will take forever to make any edits and push those edits out to every platform.’ Deep sigh.
YES. Every single book I have published has at least one part I would like to edit some more. Every. Single. One. Add some more dialogue that I just thought of (three years later). Fix a transition. Build some more tension. Add some more pain to the plot because I didn’t torture my characters enough.
It’s harder to answer the question of regrets. Do I regret any of my stories, the characters, settings, or situations I chose to tell their story? No. I believed in the story when I wrote it, and I still believe in it now. I would change a lot about my writing process, and if I could I would absolutely stop myself from feeling this urge to edit and re-edit after the book has already been published. But I wouldn’t change anything about the actual story itself.
Beneath Me, by SE White
The Sidekick and The Supervillain, by SE White
The Castle of Ohno, SE White (short story in the IWSG First Love Anthology)
The Princess in the Tower, SE White (short story in the Fall Into Fantasy 2020 Anthology from Cloaked Press)
12 comments
I have something of the opposite problem – trying to make myself revise a project I thought was finished, in response to a revise & resubmit from an agent. Ugh.
You have some snappy snippets there!
Thank you very much!
We could revise forever if we let ourselves.
I did have the opportunity to make some tweaks in my debut novel when I reformatted the interior file to update the back matter. That was satisfying, but surprisingly, I didn’t need to change much, even after 12 years.
That’s honestly great to hear! It brings me much comfort that I might not feel the need to change every little thing I see. I’m often much harder on myself than a reader would be, I think.
As we grow as writers with each book I’m sure we all have things we’d like to edit about the past books. It’s kind of rough being in a field where we continue to improve but our old mistakes are out there for all to see.
It is. It’s slight comfort that every single writer since written word began has probably felt this way? I would guess that they did. It makes me laugh to think of someone looking over their papyrus scroll and wincing at every wrong brush stroke.
We’d all continue to re-edit if we could. Some have republished books for precisely this reason. But Alex is right that we could re-edit the same story forever if we don’t stop ourselves.
Knowing when to stop! It helps that I’m usually so tired of looking at the words in my story after the editing process that I genuinely, really, don’t want to look at them again. LOL
Hi,
No gmail address and no signal, not even 1G…. They find this hard to believe.
Everybody away, left the planet , or is it just August ?
Regrets ? Lifelong or just yesterday ?
Without internet do you just use your local library to blog hop? If so, I applaud the use of free public resources!
We would re-edit until we died if we kept going back…
I feel like one Sisyphus is enough, thank you. We don’t need to become that ourselves.