100 Things You Should Know About Writing (Part 3)

60) About Rewriting

As you're finding your feet (I.E. rereading your story from start to finish after you've completed your rough draft), you will find a lot of issues that will need to be fixed. 

In fact, you're going to at least be tempted to rewrite the whole thing. 

This can be both a good thing and a bad thing, so (and this might be a refrain that'll come up throughout the rest of this book. Please don't make a drinking game out of it.) know why you want to rewrite your story. 

If you want to rewrite because you're supposed to write perfect stories from the get-go (probably because some published author with his/her head up his/her ass say that real writers write perfect rough drafts), don't do it. 

I'm serious. Some people will never make it to publishing their books because they buy into this idea that editing is for bad writers. The truth is like this: if a writer ever tells you that they never edit their brilliant published work, you can be 99.999999% certain that the writer is lying to you. 

If you're just going re-draft your story, the only outcome you can really expect is a version of your story that is simply flawed in another way. 

You will never escape all flaws when you're rewriting. Learn this. Accept it. 

So when would you rewrite? 

The common belief and my own (and a selective few other people's) opinion. 

The common wisdom says only rewrite when the problem is so substantial that revising it away will be almost impossible. 

In other words, if you find a major issue... such as needing to get rid of a character (which would mean editing the whole book to erase any sign that the character ever existed) or if you no longer like the direction your plot took after something happened in the first third of your book... Yeah. Those issues are so big that trying to salvage scenes just won't work. 

So you rewrite. 

Personally, I have rewriting as a necessary aspect to my process for every single story I work on. Yes, I know that obviously this is a necessary side-effect to my preference for drafting by hand, but there's another reason why I approach my projects this way. 

My rewrites are always a vast improvement on my rough drafts. The reasons for this lie in the way I work. 

I'm uninhibited as I rough draft because 1) writing by hand frees my mind and 2) I'm not worrying about how good/bad my writing might be because I know I'll rewrite the whole thing anyway. So 3) My rough drafts all become simply about finding the best way to tell the story. 

So when I rewrite, 1) I know exactly what I want from my story, 2) which means I can write with a fully formed understanding of where I'm headed, 3) which in turn means that I'm able to write the story in a better way than I had when I was rough drafting. The end result is an overall cleaner version of my story, which means that my edits are so much less daunting. 

There's no chance of me saying "eh, this is good enough" because changing it will be way too much effort. What I do say is "holy crap, rewriting is totally worth it." Every time. 

Especially because I'm a pantser. See, when I rough draft, my writing is all about exploring. So things happen unexpectedly. Sometimes they make no sense. Sometimes I leave a huge plot-line untied when it would have made for a much more elegant story if I had worked it into the plot better. There will also be plenty of ways in which characters don't act the way I should because I'm still getting to know them. Or where a scene just veers off course a bit too much. Especially the last one. 

That small veering off would probably be kept in if I wasn't rewriting because every event after it will have to be adjusted. But because I'm rewriting, pretty much everything gets its first adjustment before edits. 

The important thing about rewriting this way, though is to know what you're aiming for. So even if you're going to rewrite, don't skip the finding your feet phase (Part 59). You still need to know everything you want to fix before you start. 

You'll probably want to create a plan for your rewrite. 

And then you keep all of those things in mind as you go, with the point being that you don't just write another version of your rough draft, but an improvement on it. 

So if there's one bit of advice I can give you, take one project that you're working on and take a couple of weeks to rewrite at least the first few chapters. See if it doesn't vastly improve on what you wrote before. You might end up thanking me for it. 

Thanks for reading! If you take my advice to rewrite and it does improve your story, please do let me know in the comments. Also, feel free to ask me any questions about rewriting or anything else related to writing and being a writer. I'll answer you in the comments, and if your question inspires a new section, I'll dedicate the section to you. 

Coming up in 100 Things: 

Revisions:

Point of View

Genre Aspects

Structural Edits:

Plot

Theme

Characterization

Pacing

Order

Content Edits:

Characterization

Worldbuilding

Dialogue

Voice

Consistency

Pacing and Flow

Content

Tension

Copyedits:

Variation and Flow

Reading Out Loud

Active and Passive

Proofreading Tips