Hello and good day wherever you are!
There’s an experiment coming to Orphee Noir, called From bones to Birth. The idea is to show the importance of rewriting. Once or twice a week, I’ll submit unedited pieces that are a part of a greater narrative to Orphee noir. Due to the nature of writing, a point in the narrative where it is okay to stop and begin editing what has been written arrives at the end of events that revolve around the same general phenomena or purpose. Referred to in writing as an Arc. After my unedited scribblings have reached the end of an arc, I will stop adding to the narrative and begin editing the overall Arc.
This process will continue until the group of pieces has reached a satisfactory level of competency & quality, and then the process will start over. I will submit unedited pieces of events that will make up another arc until eventually, all of my arc’s construct a story. That done, I will finish my edits of the story until it is at a full bloom. I will also write random pieces inspired from either what I’m doing or probably media I’ve come into contact with or, possibly, a simple idea popping out of nowhere. Whether or not that will be integrated into the story later is up for debate but such pieces will be created nonetheless.
Now, the reason for showing individual pieces of unedited work and now refining them before editing them all once we’ve reached the conclusion of an arc is due to the fact that, for me, editing becomes incredibly more difficult without context for what the event I’m editing is for in the grand scheme of things. For example, say I’m trying to build a bike. I’ve got one of the pieces I need for the bike, but I don’t have any others or even a blueprint for what the bike’s supposed to look like.
What ends up happening when I edit only that first part is that I don’t know what specifications it needs to meet to fit into the rest of the bike, so the best I can do is simply refine individual qualities of the part, it’s length, the kind of metal it’s made out of, what it can do, etc. I can’t actually even start to build the bike in the first place until I have more pieces and start to develop the ones I’ve got once, with more of them there, I have a better picture of what the end product is going to look like.
There’s a second reason, in that I want to show that the rough draft of anything normally starts out terrible. For some, this luckily isn’t an issue. But for myself and many others the first time we put our fingers on the keyboard, what comes out is very low quality and nothing in comparison to what we could possibly end up making if we continued. It can be extremely discouraging to have to face the simple and normal reality that you can’t just start typing out on a keyboard or writing in a notebook and come out a couple hours later with at least the beginning of an award-winning masterpiece that will revolutionize all of literary history for all eternity, but reality and fiction are as far away from each other and the moon and the sun, and although there’s no problem in that, seeing the truth on paper tends to hurt.
So, I want to show that it is what it is. All it means is that it’ll take time for things to get to where they can go. That’s such a simple reality but it’s something that in the modern day isn’t easy to swallow, and that’s a shame that can’t be borne. For those who have it as a problem, at the very least.
What it is important to take home, is that the project is building a story. Not presenting one, so ya’ll are gonna be faced with some nasty pieces of literature at first, but that’s the point. I’ll explain the necessity of rewriting by going back and editing those pieces once I’ve finished an arc with them.
That being said, let’s begin.
P.S: To edit the individual arcs, I’ll be doing a podcast where I go over the work and explain my reasoning for the edits in questions, hopefully, alongside a guest.