Monday, February 04, 2008

Returning to a Work After Time Away

Recently I became involved in a discussion about students resubmitting work that had been done for an earlier class. I noted that even if there were no formal rule against it, I couldn't imagine resubmitting an essay without a minimum of one good polishing rewrite, and possibly some significant work to re-draft it. I find that if I have been away from a piece of writing for any substantial length of time, I start seeing all kinds of places where I could improve it.

For instance, over the weekend I was at a meeting, and it wasn't really feasible for me to take any of my articles with me. So I packed a story that I hadn't touched in several months. I'd figured I'd pick it back up where I'd left off, but as I reread the last page, I ended up tossing those last several paragraphs and rewriting the beginning of that scene entirely. As a result, I actually ended up writing only a couple of sentences of new text.

Of course it would be so much easier if I just had some more writing time. But unless we see some serious financial improvements, such that I can earn a lot more money in exchange for a lot less time, it's unlikely in the extreme that I'm going to have nice big chunks of writing time again in the foreseeable future.

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