I said a while back that while partying at a club near campus, I came up with an idea for a story that I could write for my creative writing class. Well, it’s been several weeks since then, and I’m still working on that short story. But let me tell you, it’s changed since the original idea popped into my head. It started out as a story about a girl who thinks she might be from the nineteenth century growing up in the twentieth century and being confused about her identity; then it lost the part where she actually was from the nineteenth century; and now the story, which was originally in first person, is now…well, it’s still first-person, but it’s the main character addressing someone else in the room with her.
There have also been minor changes along the way, things that do not really affect the story as much as these other changes have, but even as I’m trying to finish up the first draft, I’m finding myself amazed that a story still in the writing stages is changing so much. It started out as literary with a touch of supernatural strangeness, but the supernatural strangeness has been cut out and there’s just a literary story that’s unlike anything I’ve ever written before, mostly because I do not really care for literary with notable exceptions.
This makes me wonder about other stories I admire, and if they underwent huge changes in the midst of being written. I know Japanese manga and anime may have many plot changes as the story progresses, but that’s mostly because manga and anime for the most part are influenced by reader and viewer popularity, so a story arc might be added, changed, or cut out altogether in order to bring up the popularity of the story.
But did J.K. Rowling, who made me want to be a writer in the first place, make certain characters more or less prominent than she originally intended, or did Stephen King want to make Randall Flagg the leader of a whole cadre of demonic villains in The Stand? Did Thomas Harris originally intend for the Red Dragon to be a singer with a dark past instead of a sufferer of a cleft palate with a history of abuse and violence? And did George Lucas originally intend something more steampunk than regular science fiction when he first concieved Star Wars?
In actuality, other stories I’ve written in the past underwent huge changes (Ripple had a different ending in the first draft and Zahara Bakur of Reborn City was one of several main characters before she became the main character in my mind). But the scale of the short story I’m working on now (it’s title, for now, is Doll’s Game) is something I’ve never encountered before, so I’m wondering what this will lead to later. Is more change in store for me? Will I ever get a finished first draft? And what else do I have to discover about this story, what hidden tricks will I uncover next while writing it?
Tell me about your experiences. Did a story you wrote change a lot during the writing process? And how so? And did you like this change? Please tell me, I love to hear from others, especially those with more experience than me.
Rami Ungar The Writer 