“Repurposing Old Stories”

Every writer has dozens of old stories stuffed away in boxes, on shelves, in desk drawers, just waiting for the garbage can.  I’m no different.  I’ve been writing stories of some kind since I was just out of college in the mid-70s.  Most of the stories won’t and shouldn’t ever see the light of day.  Chalk it up to training.  One wag said you’re not a professional writer until you’ve put down a million words.  It takes that long and that much work to clear out all the crap from your system and get down to the true nuggets of your authentic voice.

Which is not say that old stories can’t be re-used in some fashion or become the basis for other stories.  Sometimes, these old stories are like old jeans…you just can’t throw them away.

A good example is my sf novel The Farpool, now available at Smashwords and other fine ebook retailers (downloads have reached nearly 700 since it was uploaded).  This book started life in the early 80s as an sf novel called The Shores of Seome.   I tried to place this work many times in the 80s but was unsuccessful so I put it aside.  But the idea of setting a story on an oceanic planet with a marine civilization of intelligent fish-like people underwater and human soldiers operating a defensive weapon situated on an island above water, just never would go away. 

Sometime about five years ago, for some reason, I dredged this story out of my own slush pile and revisited it.  Below are my review notes after re-reading this story:

Review Notes

1.  Need less jargon.  Less Seomish words for better readability.
2. Page 72 and on…much of the dialogue is stilted.  Need more natural-sounding dialogue, with less jargon.
3. Needs a human character involved with the story to give it some context for the reader…how a human senses and reacts to Seome and the Seomish.  Maybe a Uman from the Time Twister base (First Umanite Time Displacement Battery) who wanders off and is rescued by the Seomish? 
4. Needs more scenes to show the Uman side of the story…the Time Twister, the war with the Coethi, the bigger picture of which Seome is a part. 
5. Page 16 is a story of how the Seomish came to be…could be used in The Farpool….possibly have snippets from some great encyclopedia that Longsee loh is ‘writing’ or dictating…a sort of History of the Seomish People.

I concocted the idea of the Farpool itself, a whirlpool of such extreme strength that it could become a gateway to other times and places, like a wormhole.  The whirlpool is actually just a side effect of the human weapon called Time Twister, but for the fish-people (i.e. the Seomish), it turns out to be a gateway to Earth itself.  And as you can see, I added some human beings to give the reader a chance to experience all this from a more familiar perspective.  The result: a re-purposed story.  Essentially the same setting, but the story was changed and updated.  I even added an appendix at the end to provide additional details about the planet and its people, their culture, language, etc for those who were interested. 

The result was The Farpool  as it is today.

I am now in the process of doing the same thing with several other of my older stories.  One is a horror story written in the early 80s that still reads pretty well but is too long and needs to be edited down.  Plus it was written to be contemporary in 1980-81 and, as such, is somewhat dated with respect to cultural references, etc.  I’ll have to decide whether this story is worth the effort to pare down, tighten up and/or modernize the time period to now.  I haven’t decided yet.

There is another story, an sf story, written even earlier, which did attract some agent interest when I originally sent it around, but would also require extensive re-writing to make it work.,

The big question here: is it worth it to re-purpose an old story?  Like many things, it depends.  Ask yourself these questions:

1. Is it still a pretty good read?  Does it keep your interest, keep you turning the pages?  Remember, maybe you’re not the best judge of this.  See what your friends think.  And if you already have review comments from the past, look hard at them and see if there isn’t some truth to what they’re saying.
2. How much work is involved?  Is it likely an extensive re-write?  Just some updating, paring down and polishing?  Does the story still hang around in your mind as something worth doing?   In my case, a few of my old stories have almost possessed me over the years…what became The Farpool was like that.   It just wouldn’t go away. 
3. How does the story and the idea behind it compare with what’s being done today?  Has someone else already done this idea?  Shame on them.  Has it been done to death?  Is this really part of the ‘million-word’ crap you have to get out of your system to get down to the gold mine of your true voice? Maybe you should just pull the plug and let it die a natural death.
    
   Every writer faces this situation at some time.  The answers you provide depend on how strong is the hold of this old story on your brain.  If you can’t just let it go, then wrestle with it and maybe you can find a way to make it work in today’s market and for today’s reader.  Let’s face it: writing book-length fiction is a labor of love anyway.  You shouldn’t undertake something like a novel unless you have the vision and the stamina to see it through.  Writing a book is a marathon not a sprint.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed will come on November 27, 2017.  In this post, I’ll lay out some early details for a prospective new series of novelette-length stories called Time Jumpers.  Look for it.
    
   See you then.
    
   Phil B.