Even Charles Dickens Had to Edit

A few years ago my mother went to New York city and had a chance to see a literary exhibit at the J.P. Morgan Library.

The collection included, among other priceless works, original drawings of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the sole surviving manuscript of John Milton’s, Paradise Lost, and what I was most excited about, the original edits of Charles Dickens’s, A Christmas Carol.

As someone who loves to write and who strives to be a good storyteller, when my mother texted me the picture above, it stopped me in my tracks.

I adore A Christmas Carol. I will even boldly claim it’s my favorite Christmas story out there.

And when I think about Charles Dickens, a man who is a giant in the literary world — his works studied and read by countless students, his books regarded as the peak, the pinnacle of how to write and tell a good story — I’ll admit, the idea of him editing seems flat out WEIRD to me.

Of course, all world renowned authors had to edit their works— of course they did. I simply forget about that part.

It’s hard to imagine them hunched over their manuscript wrestling with where to end a paragraph or being unsure about a character’s motivation or torturing themselves over how to turn a phrase. Their words didn’t seamlessly flow out of a…