Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen
[A] fluid text is any literary work that exists in more than one version. It is "fluid" because the versions flow from one to another. Truth be told, all works—because of the nature of texts and creativity—are fluid texts. Not only is this fluidity the inherent condition of any written document; it is inherent in the phenomenon of writing itself. That is, writing is fundamentally an arbitrary hence unstable hence variable approximation of thought. Moreover, we revise words to make them more closely approximate to our thoughts, which in turn evolve as we write. And this condition and phenomenon of textual fluidity is not a theoretical supposition; it is fact.
Why are Textual Critics so obsessed with finding an "authoritative" version of a literary work? According to Bryant, the idea of an "authoritative text" is misguided, since texts are always fluid: they're always changing, evolving, growing. That's just the way writing works.
Think of it this way: you have a final paper due for our English class. You're dead set on getting an A in this class, so you start working on the paper the first week of the term. You write draft after draft after draft. Sometimes you go back to an old draft and revise that. Sometimes you just start from scratch.
By the end of the semester, you have a folder on your desktop that has twenty versions of the same essay. Which one is authoritative? Aren't they all authoritative, in some sense? That's what Bryant thinks, anyway. The only authoritative text here is the combination of every draft you wrote: it's a fluid text.