Some years ago, I wrote a follow-up novel to Time Exposure, a mystery about the Civil War. However, because I had changed the ending of Time Exposure just before it was published, suddenly my new story, the follow-up, would no longer work.
I know what you’re thinking. Silly, as a fiction writer, you can make anything work. You can change names, faces, hair color, locations, and personality traits. You can even kill off a character and bring him/her back to life. Hmm.
So, if I want to complete this new, older manuscript, I would, by necessity, have to revisit my earlier work and see how I could take the ending as it is currently written and revise it (believably) in the follow-up book.
Since my mysteries take place in the past but are solved today, I can use science and technology to do exactly that.
Take DNA, for instance. As a rule, if DNA is found at a crime scene, it may be matched to a suspect. However the percentage of DNA certainty diminishes when siblings are involved. Since full siblings share 50% of DNA, it is difficult to narrow the suspect pool to one person (or sibling.) Aha! This gives me wiggle room for a revised ending. I shall say no more.
The next big question is, do I seriously want to dust off this old manuscript and re-write it? Or do I want to write a completely new story? I’ve got mixed feelings. Part of me wants to re-visit the old story and not leave it buried in a drawer. Perhaps it deserves the light of day and with a total re-write, it is really a new book. Right?
The other part of me wants to jump into something completely new and banish the old manuscript to obscurity.
I’d love to hear what you think and what you have done, or what you might do, in a similar situation. Did you dust off your old manuscript, polish it up, and publish it? Or did you re-bury it in your desk drawer and begin afresh?
Ideas welcome.
My wife has used a huge duster. 🙂
You see, we trade-published our first huge novel in German in 2006, then wrote a sequel that we at once translated into English, but the English version deviated from the German manuscript so much that we decided to consider it authoritative and publish it before we would adapt the German edition to it. Then my wife started translating the first novel, too. And she kept complaining that the style of the sequel was so much more mature that she insisted on adapting the original to it.
But worse: There was one main character in the sequel who, by calculating backwards, would have been a two-year-old girl in the first book. Therefore I suggested to retrofit a cameo or some passing reference to her at one place just to indicate that she was already present. Not so my wife – whenever she got bored with merely translating the story, up popped the little one and drove the scene her way. There was actually one point during proofreading the English version when I exclaimed, startled, “What is she doing here AGAIN?”
Ha! Sounds like far too much work!