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Writers seem to either love or hate reading their old projects . On one hand, looking at old projects can be truly cringeworthy, a reminder of how little we once knew about the craft.
But on the other, reviewing your past work can be inspiring, perhaps even redemptive.
Yes, the ideas may have been poorly executed. Yes, you were at a different place in your writing journey and it may not be as polished as your current writing.
However, no matter what state your old projects are in, they are important artifacts of who you were at a particular time in your creative development.
Sometimes it is the experience and the act of working on a specific project that carries us to the next crucial stage in our growth—not the actual words.
We are often so focused on “the current thing we’re doing” that we forget how the projects that failed or that we simply discarded helped us along the way.
Having said all this…let’s talk about Taylor Swift. That sentence really should say “let’s talk about Taylor Swift, again.” If you’ve been here awhile, you know that last year, I did a post about Swift and how her two pandemic-born albums, folklore and evermore, illustrate elements of what J.R.R. Tolkien taught about where our ideas come from.
But last week’s release of “Taylor’s Version” of her beloved album Red has made her relevant to writers once again, and I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t stop to discuss why this album and one song in particular are so significant to us. Before we even get to how Red fits into the idea of revisiting our own work, let’s talk ownership and vision. Swift is rerecording her first six albums due to a controversial deal with her old record label that resulted in her losing the rights to the original recordings.
Rerecording the albums will allow her to take back what has been stolen from her…while giving fans a huge treat in the process. The newly released albums include not just the rerecorded original track listing, but bonus songs from the same era and loads of new content.
The rerelease of Red has already spawned a raucous music video for one of the previously unreleased songs, a short film, and of course, the release of the long-awaited ten-minute version of the fan-favorite deep cut “All Too Well” (more on this in a bit), which she performed on Saturday Night Live and released as an exclusive acoustic single from her website.
The point is this…artists need to fight for their visions. And that, of course, includes writers.
No writer deserves to have someone else’s vision forced on them, especially in a professional setting with people who are supposed to have their back. It’s why I believe so strongly in independent publishing and why I want to empower writers who choose to release their work on their own terms.
But Swift’s rerecorded albums are about more than just reclaiming the rights. In many interviews, she has shared that she is taking a good, hard look at her work and considering how to make it “the same, but better.” “I really did want this to be very true to what I initially thought of and what I had initially written,” she said in an interview with People. Although writing is a less public and performative art form, we can learn from Swift’s beliefs about the importance of not just claiming ownership of our artistic visions, but the revision process as a whole.
This project teaches us that even for a Grammy-award winning songwriter, there is plenty that can still be improved upon.
It takes a lot of humility for an author to not just revisit their own work, but make the decision to revise it as well. And nowhere on Red (Taylor’s Version) is this more evident than in the ten-minute version of “All Too Well.”
Like many of Swift’s songs, “All Too Well” is a wistful tale of a love affair gone wrong and the innocence lost as result. While the storyline is a common one, though, there are many literary elements that set it apart from the rest of her work.
For one thing, the use of concrete detail is astonishing. There’s a fall road trip upstate, a refrigerator-lit kitchen, a kitchen table strewn with embarrassing childhood photos. There’s also a wide array of emotions intermingled with this imagery, a progression from joy to denial to betrayal and anger.
The song’s use of musical dynamics and a haunting riff that comes and goes only add to this unique world. The original version is transportive—but the longer original version is even moreso. In a 2020 interview with Rolling Stone, Swift said she came up with the song in the aftermath of a devastating breakup. In an act of musical catharsis, she and her band improved the ten minutes of material during a session scheduled on a particularly bad day.
Fortunately, the recording engineer was on hand to keep the tape rolling, capturing Swift’s own special brand of musical lightning in a bottle.
Armed with the raw material, she later brought in co-writer Liz Rose to help her sort through what she’d created and trim the song to “a more appropriate length.”
This is an act that writers are more than familiar with. We need to spill our guts by spilling ink, but in the process, we need to know when to take a step back and assess what aspects of our work will serve the readers and which will not.
We also need to be unafraid to bring our writing friends into the process to help us gain distance from the original work and determine what our audience truly needs.
While a few very specific vignettes of the relationship are trimmed from the final product, the total effect of these cuts is a reduction of rage. If the final version flickers with bitterness, the original is a forest fire.
It most certainly would have been too intense to release back in 2012, and not just because of the prohibitive length. Perhaps hardcore Swifties would have gone crazy over it, but the highly personal nature of the lyrics might have alienated the non-diehard fans.
For example, there's this:
And you were tossing me the car keys, "F*** the Patriarchy"
Keychain on the ground, we were always skippin' town
And I was thinkin' on the drive down, "Any time now
He's gonna say it's love," you never called it what it was
'Til we were dead and gone and buried
Check the pulse and come back swearin' it's the same
After three months in the grave
And then you wondered where it went to as I reached for you
But all I felt was shame and you held my lifeless frame.
These lyrics are great...but there is a rawness to them that would have seemed out of place on Red as an album. The keychain alone comes across as pretty heavy-handed given that the entire song is about a bad relationship with a guy.
But it all works now, because we are so thoroughly familiar with the original release that seeing what it looked like in its nascent form has an allure to it.
For writers, though, it's more than allure. It's proof that Taylor Swift is human.
That she revises, too.
I think some people are quick to dismiss the extended “All Too Well” because of the reported history about its subject and autobiographical elements.
However, when examined separate from its external drama and viewed solely for what it is, it becomes a profound lesson about how to revisit and revise. The first draft is often the most vulnerable draft. It takes tremendous courage to share it with anyone, let alone pulling back the curtain on your process for people who are well aware of the excellence of your final product. Given that we are halfway through NaNoWriMo, this is a valuable lesson to take into consideration. Even if your draft does end up being a complete mess, there will most certainly be something inside it that you’ll find if you’re willing to trim away what doesn’t it.
Or maybe, years from now, you’ll go back and revisit it and discover gems that get you excited to revise them.
So, what about you? Is revising past work something you enjoy or something you dread? Either way…my Revision Scorecard is a great tool to help you out. It identifies the most common areas of concert in early drafts and then lets you rank yourself to see which things you need to work on most so you can focus your revision.
Click here to download one for free.
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