If you are curious about the writer's process, I posted the original version of Portrait of Ari on my website. It began as a scene in my first novel which I scrapped because it had irredeemable plot problems. So if you go read the original scene, I should warn you that I was in high school when I wrote this, and at the time my protagonist was a space alien who was a shapeshifting giant winged-cat person.

I was young. But there were parts that I liked a lot and so I recrafted this scene.

quote:

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as reality flickers back and forth between two possible outcomes

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Is it just me, or were the italics merely his own memories? That's what I got from the story...

Yep, Aliette, those italic sections were simply his memories--supressed memories, but memories nonetheless.

Ahem, excuse me. That was unladylike.

My dear Mr. Fisher,

I feel certain that your gentle words of critique were much of what lead this story down the road to publication.

"For all its brevity and apparent simplicity, this story packs a strong emotional punch. Beautifully, quietly done."

This is actually kind of fun, since it's a published story, I don't have to worry about making changes. (Yay!) It's also a way to differentiate this thread from the Hatrack Writers in Print area. So if you are curious about process, I'm happy to babble on about it.

The long form--and this is from the flawed novel--is that 6000 years ago another form of aliens came to Earth and took a sampling of humans. They were set on a new planet (far, far away) and modified. Humans were left as a control group. The super-aliens left after about a thousand years.

About fifty years ago, Ari's race rediscovered Earth and has been studying it preparing to make contact. They are fascinated by Earth because of the mythologies and multiple cultures. Ari's homeworld has only one culture and their entire history is recorded so they had no need for creation myths.

The fatal flaw in the novel was that one of the modifications turned Ari's people into shapeshifting winged cat-people. I could pull that out of a lot of the story but I couldn't get around a major plot point which absolutely required the giant cat aspect.

But wait--it gets worse. I was in high school when I started writing the first draft of the novel and my main character, who was not Ari, was based on, brace yourself, one of my D&D characters.

I know.

This version came about because Phobos entertainment was publishing an anthology of short stories. I didn't have a short story and decided to edit the novel down to short story length. It is unclear to me now why that seemed like a good idea. That's still not the version that went on to Strange Horizons.

Later, after I had done a lot of reading and a bunch more writing, I did another revision of the story and that's what I started sending around to markets.

Now, I'd just write a new story and try to get it right the first time. Structurally speaking, of course. I still have to edit and tweak when things are written, but structure is easier to handle since OSC's bootcamp.

It's easier to make changes if I'm not thinking about throwing things away. In fact, I've got some stories that I've returned to a previous version.

So what I'll do is pick the point where the story changes and delete all the words that follow. Then I'm no longer dealing with a complete, flawed story. I'm dealing with an incomplete story that works up to the point where I've written. If I've made the choice to make a change then chances are that I've got an idea about what needs to happen to fix that flaw. Cakewalk, right? Blank page and a clear idea.

Here's my dentist analogy. When you've got a cavity, does the dentist try to repair your tooth with the decaying enamel? Uh-uh, he drills it out so that only healthy tooth is left and then makes the repair.

In Portrait of Ari I have one line left of the original.

For Cerbo en Vitro ujo, the story I just sold to Apex (issue 6!), I've got 8 pages of scraps for a 22-page story. (manuscript format)

As far as how to make the decision to change a story...that's harder to explain process. Sometimes a crit makes me recognize a problem area. Sometimes it's because I can feel the story going wrong as it gets harder to write. Sometimes it's just because I get another idea that seems like it would be fun to try. Or I realize that I can screw with my protagonist and make their life more miserable than I had originally planned.

Regardless, my answer is to toss the words on the page and start fresh.