Updating

I’ve just been experimenting with the look of my blog. It’s now a lot pinker than it was! 🙂 I had to search around the WordPress background menu for a while to find one I liked. All the best ones seemed (unsurprisingly!) to be ones you have to pay for. So it took me quite a long time to select a free one that suited me.

And it got me thinking about updating – whether it be the look of your blog or your home or your workspace or your writing. As many of you may be aware, I’ve been thinking in my Thursday’s Children blog posts about revisiting my old writing from years ago. I guess updating is the next concept along from that. What I mean is that once you’ve revisited your old work, it’s possible to get to the stage where you’re thinking of revamping it, of updating it. This could mean taking your old ideas but starting from scratch in terms of actually writing it. Or it could mean taking parts of what you’ve written already and weaving them into a new version of your story.

It’s something I may well do sometime, perhaps beginning with my ghost story. In that case I would probably use some of what I’ve written in the updated version; seeing as I’ve already written so much it seems a shame not to use any of it and anyway I like a lot of what I’ve written. Updating your old work can give it a new lease of life. You may take it to new levels and new places. Maybe you’ll change the locations of the story, give the characters new names or perhaps radically change the plot. Or alternatively you might just change a few small things like the colour of your main character’s eyes or hair.

However you do it, updating can be fun to do. It means you don’t necessarily need to come up with a new idea for your next story – you can revamp an old story without having to start from scratch. Why not dig out that old manuscript that you barely remembered you had and take a fresh look at it? It might not be as bad as you remembered. You might surprise yourself by just how good your writing skills were ten, fifteen, even twenty years ago.

Although it could be that updating one of your old stories isn’t what you want to do right now (maybe you’re committed to your current WIP), it could be something that you might consider one day when the wells of inspiration have run dry. I know that for me, whilst I’m happy at the moment working on my WIP, I would definitely consider going back to my ghost story and maybe even others to update them and finish them off.

So don’t discount that old story of yours you’ve got languishing at the bottom of your filing cabinet. It may well be a hidden gem that could be very successful if you take the time to update it.