Editing Cassandra

Sometimes, I like to go back to my old stories and read them through, either to find out if I'm making progress as a storyteller, or to find inspiration for new stories. One thing I've often thought about is to go back and edit older works, especially one I like very much myself, called Cassandra.

I wrote the story back in February 2007, just a few weeks after joining storywrite. The story is about an author who writes about a young girl, and as he writes about her, his story comes alive (because of some sort of enchanted book). He comes to love the girl like a daughter, but has to write small texts about her in order for her to stay alive. However, what will he do when the pages of his 'magic' book runs out?

So yeah, I decided to read this story again about a month or so ago, and to my horror I found a lot of flaws =P Firstly, the structuring of the story is awful, and could easily be made better. Secondly, there are a lot of minor flaws and errors, grammatically and otherwise. And thirdly, it's just not really as good as I used to think it was =p

I'm not really blowing my own story down here, I still think the story itself and the premise is good, but I would like to edit this into something better. The lack of detail shines through the story, and it almost reads like a summary or a synopsis rather than a complete story.

So, what I did was to sit down and start editing Cassandra. At first it was easy, correcting the flawed structure and the grammatical shortcomings, followed by taking use of several tips and corrections that readers had left in the comments of the story. Suddenly, it didn't only look better, but it read easier as well. Then came the hard part...

When it was time to add things or take things away, I found that it was hard for me to do so. It's a story I've always loved myself, and one of my most read stories posted at storywrite. It's quite high in the most popular stories list at SW, coming in at nr.112 out of a whopping 141,583 stories. People have always liked the premise of the story, though I think many agrees that it could have been done better with more detail and some extra things added or taken away from it. In the end, I just couldn't really do much about it... At least not for the time being...

So, I'll probably get around to replacing the existing version with the slightly edited one soon, and I hope that one time I'll manage to further expand upon the story, and write it the way it deserves to be written =)

Thanks for reading ;D