The Ko Rule of Eternal Revision

September 2, 2022

The difference between reading a book for the second time and writing a book for the second time is that when reading a book for a second time, you are comforted by its familiarity and glad to find it how you left it, and when writing a book for a second time you are annoyed by the familiarity and feel the need to change everything often for no reason at all.

About one third of the way through re-writing my first novel, Only In Dreams, I was almost paralyzed by the thought that I might be making the novel worse. I wouldn't have any way of knowing, because I can't tell whether it was any good in the first place. I liked it when I finished it, and I'm proud of it, but upon returning to it after a few years I found many aspects that I was not happy with at all.

Some of these aspects I knew while writing them that they weren't any good, but I couldn't figure out how to improve them. Others, I liked back then, but don't like now. Other times, I don't feel anything one way or the other, until I decide to combine two sentences, or take them apart, or change a word for a synonym, or change the order of a couple of clauses, and then I can't decide whether I prefer the old way or the new way. The old version has its charms, and I feel that most of those charms also exist in the new version. But maybe there was a latent charm in the original that I can't capture anymore, for whatever reason.

More than just modifying sentences here and there, I also deleted entire scenes, added new ones, and completely changed the ending. It's not that I dislike the old ending, necessarily; it was just that halfway through re-writing the novel, having changed what I'd changed, I realized that I no longer believe in that ending. I couldn't write it again even if I wanted to.

The main character is based on myself, in many ways — more explicitly before than now, but I definitely gave him many of my feelings and some of my experiences. However, even when I wrote the book, I was writing about a younger version of myself. I was a 24 year-old writing about a 21 year-old. Now I am a 27 year-old writing about a 21 year-old. At 24, I felt a certain amount of shame about how I was at 21. This shame came with a certain level of animosity. I felt that my main character needed to be punished for being the way he was. Whether or not he learned anything from this punishment was besides the point; the point was that he shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. This led to a few plot decisions that, to me now, seem nonsensical.

Perhaps I've mellowed out on my youthful self over the last few years. I found myself wanting to make the main character a bit more likable this time around. I found myself rooting for him a bit more. I found myself believing that he deserved a better story. Like I said, I don't know if this makes the book better or worse — probably, some people would have liked it more the old way. Only a handful of people ever read that old version, or ever will, so I don't really have the sample size to figure it out. All I know is that I feel much better putting this new version into the world. Maybe it doesn't represent what I wanted to say three years ago, but it represents what I want to say now. And the me that exists now is the only me that has any say in the matter, anyhow.

I'm right on the verge of finishing the book, which is probably the moment when I have the most positive opinion of it. I haven't shown it to anyone in its finished form yet (my wife has read the earlier sections), and I haven't gone back and re-read it yet. It exists in my imagination exactly as I want it to be. I can pretend that everything I thought I put in there is actually in there.

Actually, I just remembered: there's a scene I wanted to put in near the beginning that I forgot to write. I'll have to go do that, I suppose.

It's very difficult to keep a whole book in one's head. The first time I wrote the book, I did so entirely in a single .txt document on Notepad. That made the task particularly difficult, but even now, with my well-organized system of labelled folders containing Parts and Chapters and Scenes, I find it hard to keep it all together. I've had to write every word, after all, which meant thinking about every word, and every sentence, and every scene. All that zooming in makes it difficult to see the entire picture.

Sometimes I have zoomed in entirely too much. Sometimes, I find myself in a situation resembling ko in a game of Go. Ko happens when you capture an opponent's stone in such a way that the stone you just placed is now immediately vulnerable to a counter-capture. However, this counter-capture requires your opponent to place a stone that is itself immediately vulnerable to counter-capture. Technically, you could keep capturing each other's stones back and forth indefinitely. That's not particularly fun, so they made a rule about it. It's called the “ko rule”. Basically the rule says that you can't immediately counter-capture; you have to go do something else first. Then, if you still feel like it, you can come back.

I’ve had to instate my own ko rule. The rule says that if I am changing a word or a sentence back and forth, and can't decide which way is best, I have to go to do something else. Usually when I come back, I've completely forgotten what it was I was changing, because it didn't matter at all. It only seemed to matter because I couldn't see that anything else in the universe existed.

Sometimes, I worry that I am too particular. Sometimes, I worry that I'm not particular enough. Perhaps that's another ko.

In the end, my only comfort is that I know I've done my best. There's not a single section that I looked at and said, "Yeah, I guess that's good enough." I've now re-written this novel twice, with a few revisions in there for good measure, and another final revision on the way. When I told my mom I was re-writing the book again, she said that I could probably go back and re-write the book every few years for the rest of my life. She's definitely right about that. I probably shouldn't, though.

The only way to stop myself from doing that is to publish the book. This is the strategy I use for my essays: I post them here, because if I don't, they never feel finished. If they're not finished, I can always go back and poke away at them. There needs to be a Definitive Version. It needs to become an object in the world.

I thought I was turning my novel into an object when I showed it to a small group of people a few years ago. That didn't work, though, because a month later I started a new draft. This is because I told them all when I sent it that it wasn't finished. This time, the book will be finished. I'm going to put it on the internet. I'm not sure at this point exactly how, but it's going to happen.

Then, I'm going to go do something else. By which I mean write some other novels.