For those that don’t use Docs, it retains a complete history of the document. You have a timeline you can scroll back from, or just focus on a single section of the text.
I write as a hobby, and even for me it’s fun to look back and occasionally find something that I’ve realized months later was better than what I considered to be the finished copy. Most of it’s garbage. But it genuinely gives me insight into my own process and biases.
So I think it would be fascinating to see the iterative process of a paragraph or metaphor from a published work or an actually-good author. I imagine their processes would be completely different from my own, and it would be interesting to see how their skills apply – writing long, editing, a combination, etc
Additionally, if a complete edit history of a book or author existed, which would you be most interested in diving into?
by EarlyBirdsofBabylon
3 Comments
It’s not really the same thing since it’s questionable how much Harper Lee was in the right state of mind to approve of such a thing, but her novel Go Set a Watchman, while originally advertised as a sequel to her infinitely more famous To Kill a Mockingbird, was in actuality a first draft of the novel released commercially.
Otherwise, in the social media age, I don’t think it’s uncommon to see snippets of the writing process. But for a myriad of reasons, I think it’s uncommon to see entire drafts uploaded for fans to peruse. Occasionally earlier drafts might be read aloud at events or shared in unofficial capacity, but usually not directly, and if it’s more than a paragraph or so, it would have to be long after the initial release of the book in question.
Anyone who has seen otherwise can definitely feel free to correct me, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it happen.
I’d be interested in seeing rough drafts of the Sherlock Holmes stories. With how inane some of them are, it would be interesting to see what Doyle considered too farfetched.
Oh, you need to grab “Ariel: The Restored Edition” by Sylvia Plath, with the foreword by her daughter, Frieda Hughes!
The collection has a very fascinating history because it was originally published after Plath’s death and arranged by her husband, poet Ted Hughes, based on what he thought was the right order for the poems. The restored edition has a different order based on Plath’s own arrangement of the poems, and furthermore the second half of the book is reproductions of Plath’s original draft pages with her handwritten emendations. It’s a really incredible look into her thought process and work.
I found this particularly interesting given how poetry is so tightly written that editing even a single word can be transformative to the whole. When it’s good, you almost imagine that it sprang out of the author’s head in precisely the condition in which it was published.
Lord of the Rings drafts were published. Pre-Google Docs, but same idea.