This post is by Elisabeth Grace Foley.
I’ve heard a lot of people say short stories should be written quickly, on the spur of the moment, and shouldn’t be edited or fussed over. I’m an exception to that. Occasionally, a short story will come out almost the way I want it on the first try, but usually I spend plenty of time carefully editing, re-editing and polishing each one, just as I would for a full-length novel. Which means I also become susceptible to one of the pitfalls of careful editing—overdoing it.
Can you edit too much?
I’m not just talking about perfectionism—that’s another story. There’s another kind of overdoing it—if you spend a lot of time carefully editing one particular story, you can reach a point where you’re just plain tired of it, if for no other reason than that you’ve been staring at it for so long. Sometimes this can have a bad effect on your perception of the story. The writing starts to seem either flat or overblown, the dialogue ridiculous and the plot paper thin. You wonder whatever made you write the thing in the first place, and why in the world you ever imagined you could be a writer. That usually means it’s time to take a step back.
When I submitted my short story “Disturbing the Peace” to a competition last fall, I’d spent so much time working on it and getting it just right that, frankly, I couldn’t stand the sight of it anymore. I was satisfied with it, but I’d had my fill of it for the time being. Even after it placed in the contest and was published online, I couldn’t bring myself to read it all the way through again.
luding it in The Ranch Next Door and Other Stories, I was reluctant. I hadn’t looked at the story in months, but remembering how I’d felt back then, I was afraid I’d only be disappointed. But I gritted my teeth and started reading…and I was amazed. Did I write that? I couldn’t believe how much better it seemed than when I finished with it months before. The story hadn’t changed, of course—I was just seeing it with a fresh perspective. The extent of my revisions for putting it in the collection was adding one single word.
I’d had good results with taking a break from projects before, but this experience brought home to me what a difference a fresh perspective can make. Pushing too hard on a project to the point of discouragement could cause you to spoil or scrap something that has promise. On the other hand, if there are problems with a story, you’re not going to be able to spot them if the whole thing looks bad to you. Take a break, work on something else for a little while or even take a short vacation from writing, and when you pick up that troublesome project again later on, you may be surprised at how things have fallen into their proper place—how you’ll be able to see more clearly which things actually need fixing and which things bothered you before simply because you were tired of them. It’s an experiment worth trying.
About the Author: Elisabeth Grace Foley is a 21-year-old author of historical fiction who is really too young to have done anything interesting enough to put into an author bio. She is busy trying to do something about that. She blogs at The Second Sentence and lives with her family and a large stack of writer’s notebooks in the northeastern U.S.
