rewriting, novels, stories

I've deleted some old emails, so I hope no one has posted this already. But in an interview with Larry McCaffery that I just read, Wolfe says some potentially suggestive things about the rewriting and the difference between his novels and short stories: "...[S]ince character usually seems to be the single element in my works that I'm most interested in, a lot of the rewriting I do involves fine-tuning character. This is especially true when I'm working on a novel where character has more time to predominate, rather than in stories, where often the idea or the plot twist seems more important. It's always a problem for me when I have a character like Malrubius in the Book of the New Sun novels who shows up in widely separated places -- I want to make sure he's the same person on page 300 that he was on page 10. Of course, sometimes I like the man on page 300 better than I did earlier on; then I have to go back and rewrite page 10 to make him match the way he appears later on." Across the Wounded Galaxies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990): 240-1.