Digging Up Sam Spade

What's the point of writing 'your take' on a famous character?

When you write a novel, you’re making hundreds of decisions: everything from character names to adjective choice to plot points. This granularity can terrify you if you let it—I have a hard time reading George Saunders’ “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain,” his ostensibly helpful picking-apart of the Russian greats’ short stories, because of how it reveals the almost unfathomable complexities within, say, a single paragraph of Chekhov.

Fortunately, the subconscious makes many of the decisions for you while you’re writing. If you’ve read and written (and lived) enough, your brain instinctively knows what works best for your narrative; even if you don’t nail everything in the first draft, you can usually trust that you’ve set the right scaffolding for your future work.

It also means that your characters are uniquely yours; nobody else can make the same decisions as you on the page. Which brings me to my point: trying to revive dead authors’ famous characters is a really bad idea if you value …