I recently finished another round of editing—this time, I did a personal line edit, then when I thought my manuscript was perfect, I sent it off to a professional editor who tore it to pieces all over again. Now I’ve completed all the revisions and done several full reads through it, I’m confident, Spacewalker has never been better. This was my sixth significant revision.
It brought to mind the Ship of Theseus thought experiment.
After several centuries of maintenance, if each individual part of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one at a time, was it still the same ship? [Wikipedia]
I could ask the same question of my manuscript. After six revisions, was it still the same story? Did any words from the first draft survive the many rewrites? Version one was a long, drawn-out affair of 140,000 words. Six chapters from this draft didn’t survive in concept, scene, or symbolism to now. Version six is a compelling and sharp 104,000 words. Eight chapters in this draft weren’t present in concept, scene, or symbolism in my initial effort.
Curiosity and boredom abounding, I used a combination of Winmerge, BeyondCompare, and Microsoft Word’s comparison tool to try and find an answer. Did any full paragraphs survive all this time? Technically, yes, but those survivors tended to be single sentences and mostly dialogue. I’ve cherry-picked the longest examples:
- “I was afraid of this. The sodium thiopental is interfering with the topical anesthetic. The second injection was too much."
- “It wasn’t just an IR spike. It was a giant fucking laser that tore through our ship like tissue paper.”
- “Like something is moving across the field of view,” Cris observed. “Something dark.”
- Non-specific inputs led to unhelpful outputs, even with a devastatingly sharp artificial intelligence.
So no long paragraphs survived. In fact, very few long sentences survived, at least when considering story and character context. But if I filtered for intent and allowed minor changes in tense, contraction use, glue words, etc. then the options opened up a lot more.
- His brain tripped over something so elementary, so fundamental, so elegant, so obvious, that he scarcely believed it.
- He screamed his lungs raw until he could take it no longer. Until tears streamed down his face. Until he lost his sense of dignity and slumped to the floor, silent sobs wracking his form. Until, mercifully, sleep claimed him.
- A quote from a wise friend came to mind: When you’re nose-to-nose with a trash compactor, you cool it.
- It was an impasse. The last hour had been a rainstorm of knowledge and possibility—overwhelming, wholly drenching, almost incomprehensible.
- “Are these constellations from Earth? Are they constellations from where the Atlantians went? The stars shift over time, so how long ago are we talking about?”
So yes, literal full sentences have survived through six revisions. More importantly, much of the intent of the original words persists, ignoring trivial changes. As far as the thought experiment is concerned, I think my Story of Theseus is still the same story. The overarching plot is the same. The characters are the same, albeit far more defined, three-dimensional, and complex.
And yet, going back and rereading sections of my first draft for this silly research project stirred my emotions in unexpected ways. The story may be the same, but I am not. I’ve grown and changed over five years—not just as a writer—and the changes in me have seeped into my manuscript in the themes, language, and even the characterizations.
I guess these old versions are time capsules of sorts. They will always be windows into who I used to be.