It’s easy, too, during the harder parts of the writing process not to wonder whether those other paths would have been easier, better, more powerful after all. Because they’re unwritten, they can be idealized in the way the unruly story one is actually writing cannot. The stories we choose to tell, for me at least, are messier, more imperfect things than the ones we imagine telling and set aside.
But one of the sometimes-hard things about revising is that even so you have to commit, and let those other stories go–free them up to haunt the story in subtle ways, rather than to be told in more direct ones.