I am in the midst of rewriting my epic squirrel fantasy novel Beasts of New York for next year’s onpaper publication, and I have decidedly mixed emotions about the process.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not because I have cut 15,000 hard-written words, and added 5,000 more, and given our squirrel protagonist more of a character arc, and explained the story-behind-the-story that I had previously left implicit. That’s what my editor told me to do, and I long ago swore, after seeing too many writers I admired laid low late in their careers by an excess of you-can’t-edit-me! hubris, that I would do my best to faithfully follow my editors’ advice.
No, what makes me feel uneasy is that there will now be two disparate versions of this book out in the wild. It’s been available online for some time. Even if I wanted to unrelease the online version, which I don’t, I can’t: it’s out there under an irrevocable Creative Commons license, and has already been downloaded some 10,000 times. But after the paper version is published—and I’m looking forward to it, it’s gonna be great—when people think or talk or write about the book, which version will they be talking about? Will they even know that there is more than one?
The problem, of course, is that there is no longer any such thing as “the book.” There will be two. And this happens more than you might expect. There are explicitly versioned books, to begin with, especially in SF. Heinlein too trumpeted rewriting to editorial order, and then released the (inferior) uncut version of Stranger in a Strange Land. King released the (inferior) uncut version of The Stand. David Gerrold rewrote When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One and published it as “Release 2.0”; Rudy Rucker did the same with The Hacker and the Ants. I expect there are many other examples.
But there are plenty of books that vary depending on where and when you bought them, too. Harlequin is currently rereleasing a series of classic pulp paperbacks … and “decided to make small adjustments to the text, only in cases where we felt scenes or phrases would be offensive to a 2009 readership.” The original American version of A Clockwork Orange was famously published without the final chapter present in the British version (and it was the American version that Kubrick read and adapted.) The American, British, and Canadian versions of my own Invisible Armies are subtly different, and my own notion of the book—the “author’s cut”—is a combination of all three … in other words, a version that does not actually physically exist.
I guess on some gut level I feel a book is supposed to be unique, steadfast, and constant, the Only Fixed Point around which its world of thought and discussion revolves. When your memory fails you, or a point is in dispute, you can always return to the book itself for clarity. The whole Foucault-deconstructionist approach (which is, to grossly oversimplify, that it’s the relationship between reader and text that matters, not the text, and that every such relationship is different) has always seemed impressively silly to me. While theoretically true, in practice, if you sampled everyone who has ever read Pride and Prejudice, very few would claim that it is a book about the pursuit of a great white whale.
But what if we discovered, in Jane Austen’s long-lost basement, many different versions of Pride and Prejudice? What if one of them began “Call me Ishmael”? What happens when Geoff Ryman writes 253, a book that is literally different for every reader? The Only Fixed Point reels and disintegrates, and what we thought was solid earth becomes an ice floe.
In some ways I’m quite glad there are two versions of my squirrel book. I like knowing that the extraneous-to-the-plot-but-still-really-fun scenes deleted from the onpaper version are still out there for anyone to read. But the part of me that likes certitude, and wants the literary universe to be fixed and known and comprehensible, still chants, to a soundtrack of Queen, “There can be only one!”
Perhaps tomorrow I will come back and edit this post until it is unrecognizable.
Jon Evans is the author of several international thrillers, including Dark Places and Invisible Armies, and the forthcoming Vertigo graphic novel The Executor. He also occasionally pretends to be a swashbuckling international journalist. His epic fantasy novel Beasts of New York is freely available online under a Creative Commons license.
“Perhaps tomorrow I will come back and edit this post until it is unrecognizable.”
Perfect ending.
You’ve nicely summed up why my undergrad English classes were so frustrating. Deconstruction, New Historicism, Structuralism…can we please just talk about the plot, characters, and writing style?
“Heinlein too trumpeted rewriting to editorial order, and then released the (inferior) uncut version of Stranger in a Strange Land.”
Small correction: Heinlein didn’t do any such thing. The unedited Stranger was published in 1991, three years after his death. His wife Virginia arranged for its release.
A book with the same title but different contents over time? Sounds like Leaves of Grass.
If the contents are good, then you are in good company.
I’d start to worry only if you begin to wish you had set up a code tracking system to keep track of versions.
Well, even the things we think of classic, stable texts really aren’t. Take Hamlet–Q1, Q2, and Folio versions! Austen’s Persuasion–never finished by Austen, but we do have a rough draft of an ending, let’s just tack it on and call it good! Paradise Lost–in 10 books or 12?
And while lots of literary theory does posit that meaning exists between the reader and the text, rather than in the text and/or the author’s intention, most of it does not say that the text is irrelevant. The text can’t mean just anything, even though it is different for every reader, even though it means many very different and even contradictory things. Language is still bounded on some levels by how we use it. Instead, deconstruction makes the very point you do here–that the stability of a text’s meaning is rather illusionary. We want it to be stable, we pretend that it is, but it really isn’t.
Jon, you should take a look at what podnovelists like Scott Sigler are doing with regards to versioning. Sigler, for example, takes the opportunity to revise and sometimes substantially re-write his novels every time they’re released in a new format: audio, e, paperback, hardcover, etc. His fanstend to go out and buy the same book multiple times. It’s really interesting approach, and fits in nicely with a notion I’ve seen floating around for a while regarding ebooks: looking at books like you look at software, within the context of versioning. Alpha, beta, 1.0, 2.0, etc.
Hmm.
Ever read Borges’ “Garden of Forking Paths”? Not exactly the same thing, but your post reminded me of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Forking_Paths
The final version never exists until someone else tears the beloved document from our hands, ignoring our pitiful whimpers, and assuring us that really, they like it, now let go.
In re your thoughts about Jane Austen, that sort of discovery actually does happen. For instance, George MacDonald went through no less than seven manuscript versions of his arguable masterpiece, Lilith. What happens then is that fans read the final version, and geeks and scholars have a picnic with annotated critical comparisons of the rest.
Fundamentally, the ‘only one’ is the one in your own head, and the story you’re wanting to tell. If you’d told that ‘only one’, then you probably wouldn’t be rewriting. (And hurray for you for listening to your editor! Thanks, we love you too!)
@mrpond- “The only one is the one in your own head.”
That’s an interesting way of looking at it.
Like there’s a sort of Platonic ideal version of your story, and your physical iterations of it are just your approximation of that ideal. So then, I guess you’d say that whichever came closest to your ideal would be definitive.
But then, that leaves out the end reader.
Still, I like this line of thinking!
I don’t care if different versions are unpublished and later discovered. I don’t think I’d much care about “versioned” releases of books in different formats–though the notion does result in a knee-jerk reaction “couldn’t you get it right the first time?” I don’t even much care about versions where cuts are added back in.
But I do care, very much, if an author deliberately puts forth a substantially altered, not just added to, version of a previously-published book. When Stephen King rewrote the first volume of the Dark Tower series because he had a better idea in the later volumes, I started talking (melodramatically, I admit) about “betrayal”–and that was *before* I read the ending of the series, even.
It seems self-evident to me that books don’t belong only to writers once they’ve been published, and that accordingly writers mess with that at their peril. But then, I’m not a writer.
I only read the uncut Stranger in a Strange Land, and now I’m wondering if I should read the other one.
I can’t remember which version of The Gunslinger I read.
And I was extremely annoyed to discover halfway through The Count of Monte Cristo that I was reading an abridged version, which was still 700+ pages. I wasn’t about to switch versions. So did it count?
And what about Douglas Adams, who delighted in changing the story each time it got adapted? And what’s the difference between a new edition and an adaptation?
“Perhaps tomorrow I will come back and edit this post until it is unrecognizable.”
Perhaps you already have.
In a certain sense it’s the same thing that happens when you start having adaptations… when you have a successful movie people start mixing up your plot with the movie plot, and this gets worse if there are several movies, or comics, theatrical plays, musicals, whatever. The original story gets cut, adapted, modified, completely turned over, spread into a million particles. Take ‘A Christmas Carol’: one might very well have seen at least 3 versions of it without having even read Dickens’ original. And there’s people, I kid you not, who think Tolkien’s LotR is a book version of the movies.
It is also not unheard of for modern books to have several editions, all with the official stamp of the author: Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker (a book by Tor!) has its whole editorial history online for free; Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere has at least three editions, one of which an ‘Author’s preferred’, in addition to the tv series version. It gets pretty hard to decide which is the ‘real’ one, especially when you’ve read/seen/heard one already and the author comes along and says “Wait, this is the really good version, not that one!”. What if the people like the old version better?
Maybe the easiest way is just to call them different versions/retelling of the same story, all real, all official, with just a nice disclaimer to help resolve the ambiguity (‘this is the 2009 version, not the 2007 version, got it?’). After all, who ever said you can only tell a story once?
(dear Tor, do something about the spammers, plz?)
I’m not a big fan of the whole idea of “versions” of novels either. It probably interested me more when I had the tendency to re-read a lot. Now that I’m older and more open minded about what I read, I find that I don’t have time to do much re-reading and prefer to focus on new discoveries.
Having said that, however, I’ll also say that I actually liked the “un-cut” addition of The Stand somewhat better. Actually, I’d have to qualify that by saying that I liked what was added back into the final draft; I did not like what was done to update the novel to the 90’s.
I’ve also got to admit that I really liked the edited version of The Gunslinger more than the original. The original didn’t really appeal to me that much…I read it out of loyalty to King more than anything and it was only the later books in the Dark Tower series that I really enjoyed. When King released the edited version of The Gunslinger I bought it up right away and was pleased to find that I enjoyed it considerably more than the original version.
PNH @3 – Oops. I hereby apologize to the ghost of RAH.
wsean @7 – Heh. Yeah, I like Borges a lot. I once visited the Borges Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, and was disappointed to discover that it wasn’t an endless labyrinth full of all possible books.
dglewis @12 – Exactly!
I own two different versions of Arthur C. Clarke’s “Imperial Earth”. The Dramatic Choice at the end of the book is very different in the two editions. Weirdly, I haven’t found any mention of this online. Except that I have the two different copies in my possession, I would think I was imagining it…
… or maybe I am. It’s a lot more likely that I’m crazy than that the internet is wrong.
@wsean — Well, if we keep on the line of thought than the ‘only’ version of the story for the reader it the one they’re reading at that moment. At least on their first exposure to the story. When they begin encountering other attempts at the author’s expression of that story, anything can happen.
For instance, relogical has brought Maestro Adams to our attention. I’ve enjoyed each adaptation of HHG2G I’ve encountered, each brilliant in it’s own right. But then I have this odd, probably unfashionable notion that a book is an authoritative edition. There can be versions of books (if they’re by the same author), and adaptations into other mediums.
The more I dice this, the more confusing it gets, really! IMHO — abridgments are bad, adaptations can sometimes be good, and new editions should be written because the author wants to.
Interestingly, it’s the revised editions of both the Hobbit and LOTR that are considered the authoritative versions. The others are collectors items.
Given one of your choices of example for this post…
…I’m curious if you’ve heard of/read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
I loved my history classes at Wabash. We read translations of journals of historic figures and commented upon what the popular media of the era told us about that society. What will history students make of our works in the future? Will they receive an impression of our lives and ambitions or the impressions of the perception of editors and publishers. I wonder if in the future they will decide that increasing the level of literacy in society lowered the level of intellectual discourse.
My feelings about multiple versions are rather similar to Jo’s about synopses of previous volumes: as a reader, I hate them, but as a writer I really really despise them.
I need that psychological line drawn, that now this story is done done DONE, that it is now definitively time to do something else. If that doesn’t happen upon publication, I don’t know when it does happen.
This reminds me, somewhat, in music, of the different way in which fans of popular music think of “covers” of musical compositions, versus how classical music routinely has many performances of a work, by many different artists, available. Or even of the difference between seeing a work performed live, versus hearing a recording, versus participating in a performance yourself, versus playing the work in private for your own pleasure. Or playing it in private, as practice…
How much of the difference in your work is the difference that an editor makes – is it analogous to the difference that a conductor makes in a musical performance? The effect, not just of the author rewriting, but the author responding to the contributions of a skilled collaborator?
If you were a screenwriter you’d have been paid for the re-write.
What did your Agent say about it?
_B.
Robotech_Master @19: I’ve heard of it, haven’t read it, am amused by the notion. I think new versions written by other people are a different issue, though – like cover songs, they don’t really affect the original.
Ursula @22: The difference an editor makes really varies by author, by editor, and by book. In general, though, in my experience, editors have more to say about taking things out than putting things in.
Backwardation797 @23: It’s pretty much a given that there will be some rewriting to editorial order after a book is sold – that’s part of what they’re buying. In my experience, agents don’t get involved with those rewrites except maybe in extreme cases.