Postby Andy Dibble » Wed Jan 01, 2020 6:16 pm
This may be a subtle difference, but starting at 1:02 I didn't hear a call to write fresh stories but rather (in Card's words) to "reinvent" the story. It's fine to do be big rewrites (he talks about ditching even 200 pages and starting over from the beginning) of the same story. What he cautions against is the small-scale rewrites of individual scenes: if you "wash garbage it's still garbage." I.e. if the scene feels wrong, don't try to fix it by shuffling pieces around or tweaks.
It seemed that Card was much less skeptical about editing when the scenes, both individually and in conjunction, seemed right because when they all seem right you already have a good story. At that point making the prose sing could be worthwhile.
I wonder what Card would say about the case where everything seems right except for one scene that seems very wrong. That was actually the situation I was in for my winning story: a bunch of scenes with great pacing and dialog and a good character arc... behind 2200 words of info dump!
