An Editing Deep Dive
Walden-ish
This page is meant to be a deeper explanation of what kinds of changes I made to Walden; or Life in the Woods, when I edited it into Walden-ish. If you haven’t already read my Preface to Walden-ish, that’s a great place to start to understand why I felt called to edit the original text.
Every page needed something different. Sometimes, a page needed nearly nothing. I leaned toward “DON’T TOUCH IT” when I wasn’t 100% positive that my edits were adding value.
Here are the categories where I made the most changes:
The neutering of unnecessarily gendered language in places where it detracts from the meaning, or excludes some people that weren’t purposefully meant to be left out, due to the language structure of that time (example image below). It’s a subtle difference, but it matters to those of us who couldn’t find ourselves in the original version.
Tone adjustments in places where Thoreau’s attitude could be most severely interpreted as pessimistic, self-righteous, judgmental, crass, or aggressive.
For example: “Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe;” would be reworked to read like this: “Practically, the majority of the elderly have no very important advice to give the young, for the young are freest of all; the world is boundless. Best let them be, and learn for themselves; they have much to teach us.”
The removal of parts that are cringe-worthy, and have no major message attached. Sometimes, I received some wisdom from his original text (which I thought was delivered a bit harshly), but reworking it to read as an inspiring statement help make it more digestible to me. Sometimes, it just could not be done, and a paragraph needed to be deleted. This tactic also applied to areas where a misogynistic undertone was felt.
The replacement of words that are completely out of use, unless they’re historically relevant or funny (I kept “pantaloons,” for example, but subbed in “branches” where Thoreau wrote “brands”).
Addition of my own private thoughts and learned life lessons. I don’t tell you exactly where these additions are, because this book feels like a collaboration to me, and calling out edits/additions detracts from the point.
The adjustment of parts that were indulgently boring. Thoreau was an enthusiastic naturalist, but not everyone would care to know the scientific names of all of the leaves he collected on an outing, or the dimensions of all coves of the pond. Instead of losing the reader’s interest, I preferred to tweak his monologues and only keep the juicy parts (but don’t worry, I’m a botany/mycology student and love his scientific description perhaps as much as he did. So I pruned his monologues with a sharp and careful knife).
Beyond that, the edits didn’t fall into any common “categories,” but were edits that felt necessary to me, whether for clarity, flow, or fun.
The screenshot below shows the roughly average amount of editing, per page, throughout the book.
If you have further questions about my process or rationale, please get in touch using my contact form.
