Re-discovering the punch

I have worked and reworked my short story from flash fic into a 20,000 word novella and back to a 5000 word story. Now I feel it has lost the punch it had when I first wrote it, but I can’t seem to identify what it was that made it good to begin with. How can I figure out what was magical to begin with and put it back in?@jefro_net

Sucks, doesn’t it?

Sometimes the punch that made it good to begin with was simply the fact that you hadn’t read it a zillion times before. I once brought a poem to my workshop that everyone loved. My professor, in particular, loved the kick at the end. Then after I’d changed a couple of words way up at the beginning, he said it no longer kicked. Well, it wasn’t the ending that changed. That was a problem with the kick not surviving a second reading.

Sometimes the punch disappears because the first time you wrote it, you wrote it with a natural sense of rhythm and when you rewrote you weren’t paying attention to that. So you need to let it go cold and then go through with a heightened sensitivity to the flow of the sentences.

And sometimes the punch disappears because you’ve inadvertently removed the fresh and surprising elements in your efforts to focus the storyline. It can be hard as heck to tell when something extra provides that perfect little llapa and when it completely diverts the reader’s attention in the wrong direction.

I hope you saved your original. (Always save your original!) It’s probably cold by now. I’d take a nice, uninterrupted hour to sit down with it and read it through as objectively as possible—for best results, read a couple of good pieces from your favorite literary magazine first and then approach yours in the same mindset, as a stranger—and see if you can identify those great moments that hooked, intrigued, and tickled you originally, especially the parts that kicked you off the page and into a place you didn’t expect to go.

You’d be amazed how much you can learn about yourself as a writer this way.