In January of this year I announced that I had finished the rough draft of my new book, Chasing Butterflies. That meant I had written about 30,000 words for stories that I'd never told before, which compliment more than 40,000 words of existing stories that some of my very long time readers will recognize from the past. With more than half the book comprised of stories I wrote as many as fifteen years ago, my initial projection about that project has proven to be true. This project has turned into more of an exercise in editing than anything else. What I didn't expect though was how different the process of editing these age old stories would be compared to editing stories I'd written just months ago.
When an entire work is completed within even four or five years, there's a certain consistency to the storytelling that is easy to take for granted. Normally when I sit down to edit I'll look for grammar errors and spelling errors, and try to fix any obvious holes in the plot. I'll focus on making the narrative as compelling as possible. Typically though, by the time I've reached the editing phase I'll have a firm grasp on who my characters are and, by extension, what their voice should be. However, since Chasing Butterflies is a compilation of my own stories, the narrator's voice is my own, and that voice has changed a great deal in the past fifteen years. So the question often is, how true do I stay to the original voice of the character?
There's a natural drive to put your best foot forward, especially with writing. As I've grown and developed my craft, I've learned which techniques and tropes are not effective in telling my stories. Ultimately, the most important thing is to engage a reader, because what's the value of a story that isn't read? As a result, I've evolved my style over time to be as effective at that as possible. Now when I look back on stories I wrote an age ago, I feel an urge to do massive rewrites to bring them in line with my literary voice today. At the same time, I have to ask myself what would be lost from the story if it was told in a different way.
The New Historicist view of literature claims that the manner in which a story is written speaks volumes about the cultural context of the writer. Since these stories were my own stories, contemporary to the time in which I was writing them, the cultural context of writing mirrors the cultural context within the stories themselves. My cavalier grammar mimics my tales of wandering about Little Italy and Harlem late into the New York nights. My boisterous phrasing matches strength with stories of scrambling up five hundred foot rocks in the heart of Utah. My writing style itself expresses the same thirst for adventure that begat my travels. So what is lost from the stories when those unique narrative qualities are removed?
That's an ongoing question for my work on Chasing Butterflies. It's one that may be impossible to answer, but one worth struggling with. Maybe it's a worthwhile challenge for all readers. Find a story that you wrote more than a decade ago, decide how you would write the story if you sat down to it today, and then examine how that new telling would affect the story itself. That may be the only way to consciously examine how your narrative voice has changed throughout your life.