In order to flesh out the story, sometimes you have to gut it.
Split the spine. Crack open the ribs. Reach between the sentences and remove what no longer beats.
A paragraph goes first. Then a chapter. Then the one line that made you write the whole thing.
You tell yourself the soul was in the wrong place.
You call it editing because evisceration sounds excessive.
But every cut alters the body.
Take enough and the story forgets what it was trying to say.
Replace enough and it begins to speak in someone else’s voice.
Meaning is delicate that way.
Change a word, and the wound moves.
Change the ending, and the beginning becomes a lie.
So you stitch it back together with pieces chosen from every version it was never meant to be—
the hand from one draft, the mouth from another, a stranger’s eyes, your own old grief—
and wait for lightning.
It lives.
Of course it lives.
But it rises from the table changed by every hand that tried to save it.
And somewhere beneath the clean new sentences, the first story is still there—
crossed out, cut open, calling its creation by the wrong name.
The ink bleeds through.
Beside the Stories
Frankenstein was not written once.
Mary Shelley published it anonymously in 1818. Thirteen years later, she opened the body again—cutting, replacing, softening, sharpening. The 1831 edition altered more than the language. It changed culpability. Sympathy. Fate. It changed what the story seemed to believe about its creator and his creation.
In the first version, a very young Mary Shelley wrote about a man who does something monstrous.
Victor creates life. Then, at the first sight of it living, he recoils. He gives his creation no name, no guidance, no care, no place among other people. He abandons it and later condemns what it becomes in the isolation he created for it.
The first monstrous act belongs to the man.
In the revision, fate begins taking some of the blame. Victor becomes less the author of his own ruin and more its appointed victim. The abandoned creation becomes more deliberately cruel. The creator becomes more tragic. The creature becomes more monster.
Shelley did not merely revise what happened.
She revised where the guilt belonged.
I wonder what happened during those thirteen years.
Did she hear the critics inside every sentence she reconsidered? Did age alter what she believed about choice and consequence? Did grief make fate feel more powerful than free will? By 1831, she had buried three children and her husband. Perhaps she returned to the story because she had changed. Perhaps the woman revising Frankenstein could no longer believe everything the girl who wrote it had believed.
Or perhaps she simply saw the seams.
There is no clean way to know which hands were hers by then and which belonged to everything that had happened to her.
The creature was never given a name.
He is called creature. Wretch. Daemon. Fiend. Monster.
Words that describe him without recognizing him. Words that make it easier to reject something assembled in the shape of a man while denying that it might be one.
Shelley named the book for the creator.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
The title tells us where to look: at the man who stole the power to create life and then refused responsibility for the life he created.
But we looked at the creature.
Young Mary Shelley wrote about a man doing something monstrous. We turned it into a story about a monster.
Then we gave the monster the man’s name.
Frankenstein made a monster. The monster made Frankenstein. Eventually, neither could be named without invoking the other.
The error endured because it contained its own kind of truth:
What you create defines you.
I wrote MONSTER REVISION beside the two versions of Shelley’s novel, thinking about what happens when an author opens a finished story and changes what lives inside it. How much can be removed before the original meaning dies? How much can be replaced before revision becomes another act of creation?
And if what rises from the table is no longer what you intended to make, does it still belong to you?
Or do you belong to it?
The poem above was written alongside the novel.
—Lore