Reflections on Co-Writing a Book with My Younger Self

A late-summer project update

My main summer writing project was revising and updating The Strategically Small Church. To qualify as “revised,” the new edition must differ from the original—whether from addition or subtraction or both—by 20 percent.

The comedian Mitch Hedberg once said, “I’m gonna fix that last joke by taking out all the words and adding new ones.” That’s essentially the approach I adopted for this project. When it was all said and done, I added about 9,000 words and deleted about 8,000 words. After a month’s work the manuscript is about twenty percent different and almost exactly the same length as when I started. How ‘bout that?

The Strategically Small Church was my first book. It was published in 2010, when I was twenty-nine years old. The world has changed significantly in the intervening fourteen years. And so have I. It’s taken all my self-control to resist the urge to rewrite the entire manuscript. But resist it I have. Mostly I updated statistics, added some historical and cultural context, and deepened the engagement with Scripture. I told some new stories and revised some old ones. Four of the original eight chapters required significant updating. One of them is mostly new. Four chapters remain largely as they were.

The experience of revising a previously-published book was more fraught than I expected. One reason is the value proposition. Revising an old work holds out the promise of improving something valuable so that it becomes more valuable. That’s best-case scenario. Worst-case scenario, of course, is ruining a good thing by taking out all the parts people liked in the first edition. The Strategically Small Church has sold about 10,000 copies over the last fifteen years. Sales at that level don’t amount to boat money or second house money or even first house money. But they indicate that the book found an audience. My conversations with pastors across the country over the last fifteen years indicate the same thing. People liked the first edition. I hope I didn’t screw it up.  

I submitted the manuscript to my editor last week. Here are some reflections on things I found surprising about revising a previously-published book:

Revising fifteen-year-old work is like co-authoring with your younger self.

The experience of revising something written by a younger version of myself was a bit like co-authoring with someone you know well whose opinions are sometimes surprising. As I read my old writing, I found myself thinking, Well, I wouldn’t put it quite in that way, when I had, in fact, put it exactly in that way. 

I didn’t encounter any opinions or positions that needed outright denouncing. That’s good. But my style has changed in the last fifteen years. I’d like to think it has “matured.” Lots of my original paragraphs were overwritten. There are too many long, complex sentences in the first edition. I found myself thinking, Ok, young Brandon, just put a period in there. Anywhere. It doesn’t matter where, just. stop. typing. 

Young Brandon really liked semicolons. What a dweeb. 

And the phrase “after all.” I went hunting for that phrase and found it about ten times. They are all gone now.

I know too much now—and too little. 

In the summer before my first semester as a full-time college professor, a former professor of mine told me it’s easier to teach a survey course outside your area of expertise. This is because you know just enough about the subject to hit the high points without getting bogged down in unessential details. In your own field, there are no unessential details.

I don’t consider myself an expert in the area of small church ministry. I’m a close observer, former pastor, long-time volunteer, and general enthusiast. I notice things. Nevertheless, I know more than I used to. I know enough now, for example, to clutter up a clear line of thought with miscellaneous information that is interesting only to me.

At the same time, I’m also more aware now than I was fifteen years ago that I’m speaking as an armchair pastor. Yes, I’ve been up to my eyeballs in small-church ministry for all my adult life. But the buck doesn’t stop with me. And so I feel more self-conscious and a tad insecure this time around. I had ignorance on my side before. Ignorance is a great prophylaxis against insecurity.

At least there’s a first draft.

A clear advantage of the revision process is that the hardest part of writing is often producing the initial draft. At least in this case I already had a first draft to work with and it wasn’t terrible. 

I found it hard to “draft” instead of “edit.”

Writing goes best for me when I separate drafting from editing. The drafting process should be free and unencumbered by concerns about quality and final composition. Just get the words out on a page. Editing is where the organizing, clarifying, and sense-making happen. Drafting is like emptying the fridge to see what’s in there to cook with. Editing is making choices and chopping veggies.

I think of my drafting time as supervised by my Internal Author, while my editing time is supervised by my Internal Editor. Internal Writer is creative and generous and sometimes even clever. Internal Editor is critical and harsh and believes we should find better things than writing to do with our free time. If my internal editor and writer are on duty at the same time, the editor always wins.

Working with a previously-published manuscript made it unclear at times whether my author or editor should be on duty. There was plenty of drafting to do. But because I was working with a completed draft, that felt like the editor’s territory.

As a tactic, I started a second document for drafting. I wrote up all-new paragraphs, stored quotations, and typed up reading notes in the “drafting doc.” Internal Editor knew better than to meddle in there. Eventually I copied and pasted some of that material back into the final doc and let the editor do his worst.  

I had to work in Microsoft Word. 

Gross. 

In general, I found the process invigorating. It’s been a few years since I’ve worked on a book-length project. It felt good to blow the dust out and get the old engine running again. 

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If you’ve found these reflections on writing the slightest bit interesting, you might enjoy my slim manual on writing, Writing for Life and Ministry.