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Should You Rewrite Your Older Work? · The Daily Writer

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey my friend, thanks for joining me today.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: One of my email subscribers, Preston Silver, sent in a question.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: He asked this Do you have any advice for taking an older story and giving it a polish or rewrite to fit a writing style that has since matured?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Preston, that's a great question.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think that when you're looking over your older material, it's important to think about it on two levels, the heart and the craft.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: The heart is what makes it special.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Is there an element, character, theme, or some other aspect of the story or writing that really makes it pop?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: What is it about the piece that you really like and what makes it seem like it comes alive?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: The heart is like the melody and lyrics of a song.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: They're elements that shouldn't change.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: The craft, however, can be changed.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: The writing can be tightened, or scenes and details of the story or the writing can be altered or improved or even cut.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I look at the craft like the arrangement of a song.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: A song can be performed in lots of different styles with various instruments or singers, and that arrangement can radically change the tone and the feel of the song.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: However, the heart or the melody and the lyrics of the song remain fundamentally unchanged because that is the essence of the song.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the challenge when you update older writing is to keep the heart while improving the craft.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: But sometimes, however, I think it's good to look at something that we wrote when we were younger and just let it be whatever it was at the time that we created it.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: George Lucas, I think, taught us something important when he created the Star Wars special editions back in the 1990s.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Remember those?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: When he took the old, the original trilogy of the Star Wars movies and he added all these special effects and other scenes to them, and most of them were not honestly very good.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And what we learned from that is that sometimes tinkering with the work that you made when you were younger actually makes things worse.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Then again, if you still find yourself excited about what you originally wrote, then doing a rewrite or maybe even a second edition, if you've already published it, that can be a really great opportunity to improve on the original.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's it for today.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you next time.