Evolution

I have no misconception about the kinds of things that I write here on the blog. They are random bits of stories or thoughts that come and go without much connection or communication between any of the others. They're not like a book where things have to have some sort of flow or at least a tie between events so that, when you reach the end, you have some sort of understanding about what has happened throughout the story. With the small segments that I've spent the last year writing, this is a concept that I have, for the most part, ignored, and so have not been able to comment heavily on. These are also rough drafts, largely unedited, save for spelling errors, but this is where the topic I wish to talk about begins.

I mentioned at the beginning of the month that I would be spending November participating in National Novel Writing Month. This isn't the first time that I've done this - attempting to write an entire novel in the span of a single month - but it is the first time that I have done so alongside creating these short rough drafts. And now, being able to so closely compare the two, one thing in particular about book writing has begun to stand out to me.

When writing these short stories, there's not a whole lot of space for things to get mixed up or changed as the story evolves. In fact, there isn't a whole lot of evolution in each story in general. There is in my writing - and much like real evolution, it is a very slow and sometimes failure-ridden or subtle process - but not in each individual story.

In writing a novel, that isn't the case. Something that you wrote at the beginning of the story, as you continue to write, you begin to realize doesn't quite work with where the story is going. And eventually, it becomes so different from where the story begins that you have to go back and rewrite it, else the rest of the story simply doesn't make sense anymore. These can be small details, things that less perceptive readers might pass over, but they can also be large story points or background information that is as integral to the story as breathing is to humans.

And it can be tempting to go back now, while you're still writing, and change it as soon as the change becomes needed. But what happens if it changes again later on? You never know how many changes are going to happen, or how frequently they will come about, or if all those changes will be in different places, or if it will be one thing changing over and over and over again, until by the end of the story it has become so redefined that every instance of it will need to be rewritten. And sure, you can go back and do it throughout, but doing so is preventing you from getting to the rest of the story.

It's something that you never really think about when you're just reading. By the time that story gets to its audience, all of those evolutions have already happened and been corrected. But it doesn't take long into the writing process for it to pop up.