For some writers, a first draft is like a block clay, a pile of words ready to be punched into shape. For others, it is like a nearly finished sculpture, needing only a bit of fine-tuning and polishing. And then there are a spectrum of drafts in between these two possibilities.
For those of us who are more on the block of clay end of the spectrum, the process of writing our story has just begun. Now it’s time to rewrite.
Rewriting is exactly what it sounds like, throwing out large swaths of your draft and dramatically rewriting them. It might be as simple as taking out a secondary character and making all of the necessary accompanying changes, or it might be as complex as realizing that your story is about something completely different than you thought it was about. When you rewrite, you cut whole scenes and add in whole new scenes. You make large structural changes, whereas with revision, you make smaller level changes in order to tell the story more clearly, more dramatically, or more engagingly.
For me personally as a writer, probably the most time I spend is in rewriting. As I learn better methods of planning, that time gets cut in half. Nothing helps prevent me from needing major re-writes like knowing clearly where my story, both in terms of plot and in terms of character development, is going.
In spite of this growth, I still find myself doing a lot of rewriting. And that’s probably because as I draft, my drafting deviates from the plan. That’s not a bad thing, because in that process I do find the true story I want to tell, but it does mean that I often start out telling one story and end up with a different one. The problem with this is that there’s often a lot of wonkiness in the middle as I switch gears.
Another problem that often leads to rewriting is the will of the characters. I’m still not very adept at clearly planning out my characters’ motives and emotional journeys before I draft. So what happens is I end up discovering these things along the way. And a shift in motive for a major character, or a sudden change in their character, for example, say a passive character decides not to take any sh*t any more, can change the events of the story dramatically. I’d love to be able to plan that stuff out beforehand, but so far I haven’t managed it.
Rewriting is probably the most challenging stage in revision because it’s easy to get lost in, and it’s hard to distinguish what parts of the draft to keep and what parts to throw away, what parts need to be re-drafted. It’s also hard to know if you are overworking the story through rewriting or if rewriting is truly justified. Also, it can be easy to make the wrong decisions in a rewrite and end up with a worse draft than you had before!
In spite of the challenges, you must not be afraid to rewrite. Freeing yourself to rewrite can help you find the true story and get it on the page. If you don’t rewrite when the draft calls for it, you will end up struggling to revise a broken draft, kind of like trying to fix the body on a car with no engine.
In order to make rewriting less daunting and more effective, you can break rewriting into these four stages:
- Assessing—Ask pertinent questions about the draft and answer them to determine whether a rewrite might be necessary.
- Planning—Write up a strategy plan that clearly states the changes you will be making and why, as well as what all the implications to those changes are.
- Noting—Read through a printed draft and mark up the changes necessary for the rewrite.
- Rewriting—Make the actual changes to your file
In the next post, I’ll talk about the specific questions I use to assess whether or not a rewrite is actually necessary, or if I can squeeze by with a revision. Stay tuned for 101 TIWIK #57: Rewrite: Molding the Block of Clay (Part II)
