The other day, my publisher called:
ME: Hello, this is Jeff–you may already owe me money*.
PUB: Actually, after reviewing the accounting, you actually owe us sixty-four thousand dollars after triggering the morality clause in your contract, but that’s not why we’re calling.
ME: If it’s about those office supplies, I can explain. I was drunk.
PUB: What office supplies?
ME: Sorry – I am drunk. What did you want?
PUB: We’re putting out a new edition of The Electric Church, anything you want to change?
ME: I’d like to change the title to JEFF SOMERS BADASS KILLING MACHINE. Also, I’d like to change the main character’s name to Jeff Somers.
PUB: <dial tone>
We’re entering into a weird era for writers, I think. Technology is going to offer us the opportunity at some point to continuously edit and revise our work. Once our books and stories are out on Kindles and yet-to-be-invented devices, we’ll be able to suddenly decide to clarify a character’s motivations in chapter 25 and beam it out to everyone overnight. Readers wake up the next day, switch on their readers, and boom! A new changed version of the book.
Some authors never stop revising, and for them this is probably a wonderful thing. Heck, some authors would love to completely re-write their books thirty years after publication, whether because they suffer from Authorial I Suck Syndrome or because changing technology/history makes their story inaccurate or laughably dated. Me, personally I tend to regard things as finished and if I decide years later that I didn’t do a very good job, or that I could do better, I’d rather just write a new version of the story from scratch. Whether or not authors will like the ability to do this, I think the better question is whether we should be allowed to, and what it would mean for readers.
I’m not sure it would be so great for readers, actually. The idea that my copy of a book can shift without my knowledge – or, hell, with my knowledge – is horrifying. Bad enough for fictions, where the very scene or dialog that grabbed you and made you fall in love with the story could be completely rewritten or deleted years after you read it, but imagine history books being edited remotely, biographies, anything. You can go totally paranoid and imagine every reference to some political event erased from every book, ever, or you can stick with the depressing thought that should I someday have a Philip K. Dick stroke-moment, I might be able to go back to The Electric Church and insert lots of giant bunny rabbits speaking Latin.
Of course, death silences all of us, so eventually a book will have to settle down into a canon version. . .unless of course the estate, which will hold the copyright for a while (possibly forever and ever if things keep sliding towards hell the way they have been). It’ll be great when the grandson of a writer can go into their ancestor’s files and start editing their books, won’t it? Watch and see. I think Douglas Adams once speculated on how horribly chaotic history would become once we developed time travel, well, this is it: A world where nothing will ever be set in stone ever again. Unless you actually carve your book into tablets as some sort of marketing gimmick. Which is genius.
At least you can count on my disastrous disorganization and laziness to protect you from this fresh hell in my books at least. Though be careful when my liver finally pops: The wife is very eager to get in there and “correct” my books. Read ’em while you can.
I hope this never happens.
I can recall scenes from many of the books I’ve read like they’re my own memory. Example: I can put myself back in that alley when Avery first sees what the monks are capable of. When he’s running for his life and trying to sober up at the same time.
To see some of my memories changed on an author’s whim might cause irreparable harm to my already fractured psyche.
I would love to buy a book that was carved in tablets.
Say, would you mind carving TEC into a tablet and signing it for me? I’ve got…. a dollar and thirty-four cents plus pocket lint for the commission.
Oh, don’t get me going. If you’re writing nonfiction, of course you’d love to go back and revise it: Stephen Jay Gould stated repeatedly that he wished that he had the power to destroy every copy of his first collection Ever Since Darwin because of the errors and subsequent revisions in scientific thinking. However, it’s actually a lot more honest to leave them alone, or at the worst include errata that updates the situation. After a while, though, at what point do you give up and realize that the book is beyond salvage due to changing events, and that it’s now just a historical curiosity?
I had a lot to think about when I was putting together my two collections, and updates to articles I’d written ten and fifteen years ago were particularly important. Interestingly enough, a couple of the postscripts I included with many of those articles are already out-of-date, and Greasing the Pan just came out. I could go crazy with wanting to update further, coming off as more and more of a crank, or I could just let it go and have everyone accept that time catches up to all of us. And so it goes.
Dan,
I promise to never change that scene and then beam it directly into your dreams.
J
$1.34 is the installment plan. That gets you the letter “T” carved into a bathroom tile.
J
Paul,
See, even for nonfiction I think there’s value in seeing what people thought, what the state of the art was at the time. I love picking up old history books to see what the *sense* of things was, even if the data is outdated etc.
Though I can totally understand the desire to revise even decades after the fact. I’m just glad it hasn’t been possible.
J