Of course authors
have to read their own work in order to revise it. But do they read
their own work after it’s been published? To put it another way, do
they become one of their
readers? Maybe
they do, maybe they don’t. However, I’m one that doesn’t. I may
have only read one of my published stories once and that was probably
the first fiction work I published. It’s entitled “Strange
Phenomena” which now appears in my short fiction collection, The Fool’s Illusion. Before
that, I published it in an anthology of myth themed stories and
poems, called Leafkin, Volume 2, which is unfortunately out of
print. If I read it in that anthology, if I’m remembering
correctly, that’s because I wanted to see how it read in its
published format. Since then, I haven’t had time to read my own
work post-publication.
In my experience, by
the time your story gets published you
know it too well to where you don’t want to read it anymore. After
the numerous revisions you’ve gone through on a single story, you
want to just move on to writing the next one. You nearly know the
characters by heart; you are tired of reading their verbal and
gestural responses to each other and to situations to the point where
they sound phony after you’ve done so much just to make it sound
the opposite. Not to mention, you notice all the story’s
shortcomings (the few that may had been left behind in the revision
process). While this may be a good thing so you can avoid those
mistakes when writing your next story, noting them is what book
critics, both pro and consumer (such as Amazon customer reviewers)
are for.
I
was reading a New York Times article the other day that
interviewed Steven Spielberg, director
of the upcoming film,
Ready Player One.
He says in the article that he never watches his films
after they’ve been made, regardless of their level of success. He
says he’s too busy to “look back a lot” and so simply moves on
to making the next movie. It’s very true that we should learn from
our mistakes and let our successes encourage us to not only move on
to attempting more successes but to even better ones. So an author
should remember the mistakes of past stories to avoid them in future
ones but not put him or herself down over them. When they do that
they only set themselves up for failure the next time around and so
discouragement from writing more stories.
I’ve had a lot of
stories fail and so were never published. When I look back, I think
to myself that if I were an editor I probably would toss them in the
garbage by the third sentence of each. There have been times when
I’ve resented them so much that I wanted to burn them. But my
poorest, most rotten of writing is what got me to better writing
today. In a certain sense, an author has to fail to succeed. So if
one story or book you wrote does bad as reflected in critics’
comments, or low sales, whatever, you simply learn what you did wrong
and then go on to the next story or book and make it better.
It may help some
authors to read their work after it’s been published so they can do
better in their next writing project. But, whatever an author does,
the most important thing is to write the next story. It’s the only
way you will get better at writing stories, by continuing to write
them.
Fellow authors, do
you read your stories after they’ve been published? Readers, do you
know whether any of your favourite authors do this? If so, which
ones?
Until next time . .
.
 |
| Credit: Wikimedia Commons |
Comments
Post a Comment