I rewrote my first book. After it was successful, after it gained a following, I went back and gutted parts, and added whole sections, descriptions, imagery and more. Then I ran a successful Kickstarter campaign that reached funding in 48 hours. But WHY you may ask?
Well, let’s start with the facts and who I am. My name is Matthew Wolf and I wrote an epic fantasy series that reached the top five on Amazon, sold over 100,000 copies,I toured conventions all over the US signing for thousands of fans, but I still wasn’t happy. Well, not happy might be melodramatic, but it all stemmed from a feeling that the book I started when I was 18 didn’t accurately reflect the writer I had become when I was 26.
This is natural and inevitable. Unless I stay 18 forever, or somehow reach my writing maturity (if there is such a thing), then the process of writing and my art, and everything about the craft will mature. Like stinky cheese. Or wine, let’s go with wine. You gain sophistication, you learn to tease out description and build tension more intentionally, etcetera. So knowing that everything is a process, why did I go back to rewrite something that was already successful? That was in over 100,000 or more peoples’ hands.
Well, it started with the reviews. I would wake up and read these glowing reviews or (as is often the case with reviews) scathing ones. I don’t mind bad reviews. Well, obviously, I would love for everyone who stumbles across The Ronin Saga, my epic fantasy series, to tip-tap away at their keyboard with tears of joy in their eyes. No one likes a negative review. But as I went from convention to convention, gaining fans and friends, I would often, say to first-time readers , “You’re going to love the series.” (And I do genuinely believe that). But then I’d add this little caveat, “Book two really takes off where book one set the foundation. If The Knife’s Edge is the ‘bones’ then Citadel of Fire is the ‘Flesh’”. It’s true, and many books are like this, but I couldn’t let it rest on the laurels of “just good”. While it had 4.2 stars on Amazon and 3.7 on Goodreads, some reviewers mentioned immature dialogue and a lack of some description, but most common, it was a great fantasy tale that suffered from feeling “rushed”. This was fixable. In fact, there were about 30,000 words of story that I knew would bring book one to Citadel of Fire’s book two), level.
However, this was a tricky situation. If you are writing a book for the first time, the best and only and most lackluster advice you’re going to get is: “write”. I would follow this with: “publish”. Humans as a species aren’t meant to toil away for two, three, five, ten plus years on a single piece of art. We are meant to give birth to many things, to continue to evolve. Unless your canvas can evolve as quickly as you can, works over 2+ years, suddenly become difficult and messy. Not just content-wise. You might be able to keep all those 800 pages together in your head, sure, though unlikely. Oftentimes, what you wrote on page one was 2 years prior to page 500. This creates time lapses, visual cues that aren’t fresh in your memory, an arc for a character that doesn’t follow an accurate curve. But more commonly, it’s not the writing that suffers but the feeling. Endlessly tweaking “kills”. What once was fresh and new and unknown when you first laid eyes on your project, a freshly manicured lawn, now becomes a wild, murky jungle. Now you’ve been hacking away with your machete unsure if chapter two has any true correlation to chapter two-hundred and twenty-two and you almost dread opening your word file.
So this revision had to be different. To pull off my masterful rendition, it was going to have to be like a scene from Ocean’s 11. A master heist with all the right components. I laid out my tools and requirements like a grocery list. First and foremost, it was especially important that I did not do a complete overhaul. Something like that would only get me lost in the sticky web of my writing. Second, I knew it had to leave the heart AND tone of the story intact. Yes, I had matured, but I believe some of what pulled people into book one and the younger characters was the tone of the story. Not Games of Thrones dark, not riddled with pithy comments that felt unnatural coming from eighteen-year-olds with elemental powers. It had to feel fresh, vibrant, smart, but keep what attracted people to it in the first place. Third, it had to fill in the missing gaps. If I was to do this, then I had to not just write, but I had to read all the bad reviews (and I mean all of them) and filter out the objective and real advice from the trolls, and discover how I could add these things to The Knife’s Edge. I was scared of course. Hoping against hope that it wasn’t a monotonous list. Alas, and fortunately the changes mostly consisted of just “more”. Lastly, I had to make sure all the changes I was making weren’t for critics, but for me, and for the arc of the story. You can’t please everyone, but your story and its integrity should be your first priority.
Well, one year later, and an additional 30,000 words, I re-released The Knife’s Edge, book one of the Ronin Saga. Since then, we’ve reached and stayed in the top 100 of all fantasy audiobooks and top 10 of new releases, and I honestly credit much to an amazing narrator--Tim Gerard Reynolds and my tireless efforts to make my work the best possible. I’m not saying The Knife’s Edge, Second Edition, is perfect, I’m not saying I'm Shakespeare, but going back and doing better is often possible both in life, and in writing.
Yes, the moral of the story is a solid, underlined and bold declaration to all writers and creatives: push forward, hit publish, then hit next. But if you hit next, nothing in the world of writing is ever truly written in stone. So be brave, be vulnerable, both you and your work will be better for it.
Matthew Wolf
www.twitter.com/roninsaga