Margins / 26Notes From Beside The StorySeptember 23, 2026

The Ink Bleeds Through

Notes from beside the cutting-room floor.

Sometimes, in order to flesh out a story, you have to gut it.

You cut the sentence you loved. Pull out the chapter that took three weeks to write. Remove a character who arrived fully formed and refused to leave quietly. You strip the story down until you can see what has been holding it upright—and what has only been taking up space.

Writers call this revision.

A cleaner word for dismemberment.

The trouble is, stories remember what you remove.

A deleted scene leaves a tenderness in the one that follows it. A character cut from the page still haunts the conversations written for them. Even when the words are crossed out, covered over, or replaced, the pressure of the pen remains.

The ink bleeds through.

Maybe that is what gives a story its body—not only what survives the cutting, but everything buried beneath it.

Every version it used to be.

Every version it almost became.

Every version still showing through.

MONSTER REVISION

In order to flesh out the story,sometimes you have to gut it.

Split the spine.Crack open the ribs.Reach between the sentencesand remove what no longer beats.

A paragraph goes first.Then a chapter.Then the one linethat made you write the whole thing.

You tell yourselfthe soul was in the wrong place.

You call it editingbecause eviscerationsounds excessive.

But every cut alters the body.

Take enoughand the story forgetswhat it was trying to say.

Replace enoughand it begins to speakin someone else’s voice.

Meaning is delicate that way.

Change a word,and the wound moves.

Change the ending,and the beginningbecomes a lie.

So you stitch it back togetherwith pieces chosenfrom every versionit 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 tablechanged by every handthat tried to save it.

And somewhere beneaththe clean new sentences,the first story is still there—

crossed out,cut open,calling its creationby the wrong name.

The ink bleeds through.

N.B.

This started while I was writing and researching VORLASS. Somewhere between the cutting and the stitching, I realized I was holding Lore’s pen.

(For anyone new to the margins: Lore Lassen is the fictional author at the center of VORLASS—and yes, I went so far down the rabbit hole that I built her an entire author website.)

On Lore’s preserved site, this piece doesn’t end with the poem. It continues in her character’s voice—digging into Mary Shelley, the 1818 versus 1831 revisions of Frankenstein, and what happens when an author reopens the body of their own creation.

Continue reading in Lore’s voice at LoreLassen.com →

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