I was kvetching a while back about the difficulty in taking all the stuff I’d learned at Clarion and fitting it into my bunch of pre-Clarion stories I’ve written. Boris Layupan, a Clarion chum of mine, passed on a word advice he picked up from an author at another workshop (I think it was Dean Wesley Smith): try rewriting an old story rather than just editing it.

My initial reaction (and this was months ago) was, “Yeah, right.” I mean, I’d already struggled with a story once, tamed it, and put it on paper. My pre-Clarion writing wasn’t bad, it just needed some massaging. It didn’t need a total overhaul, right?

Right?

Well, I’m having serious second thoughts on this position. I’m still working on “Black Jack Davy” and the nip here and tuck there I expected has turned into a major rewrite. So major, in fact, there’s an audible clunk when the story changes tracks from the original to the new. I thought I could do some cutting and pasting, spackle over a few cracks, add a little more depth and description and things would be fine.

Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.

Turns out this is a new story. The characters, setting, and basic plot remain the same but the rest–and I mean everything–is different. What else is there to a story besides characters, setting, and plot? Quite a bit, actually. I have a new appreciation for the subconscious mind at work while writing. The tone of the story is completely different and I can’t quite put my finger on how it is, but it is.

I’m also discovering that I’m now writing three kinds of stories: short (under 1K words), medium (2-5K words), and long (8-10K words.) The vast majority of my pre-Clarion stories weighed in between 6-8K. If I squeezed the air out them, most would fall in the medium range of 2-5K but, as described above, that would require complete rewrites and I’m simply not in love with many of them to justify the work required. Likewise, “big” stories are akin to running a marathon. You can’t just decide one afternoon that you’ll sit down and write a 10K story and pull it off, or at least I can’t.

“Black Jack Davy” is a big story, or at least this version is, but I have a very real plan for it. It’s long and wide and covers a long period of time but there’s a fast-moving undercurrent and things change rapidly beneath the surface. Or at least that’s the goal. It’s ballooned from about 7K at Clarion to about 10K now but there’s more story to it now. I hope it’s essential backstory as opposed to the stuff you throw out there just so you, as the author, can learn about your characters. But it reminds me of another story I wrote at Clarion and discussed at length with Kelly Link. Often, a single word or phrase can illuminate a character’s entire background for the reader but other times it just can’t and you need to go into more detail about a person’s emotional make-up. Making a story compelling for 10K words is not an easy task. We’ll see how it goes.