E. B. White once said that “The best writing is rewriting.” I’m not sure about the best, but writing requires a ton of rewriting. As a chronic pantser, I’m no stranger to the rewrite. This week I’ve been embroiled in yet another rewrite and been doing a lot of that ^^ but this time I’m taking a different approach…
This story starts several years ago when my attempt at writing a novel about a certain angel left a lot to be desired. Forward wind about 18 months, and I had yet another draft. Critiques were not favourable, the characters weren’t working, the POV was wrong. In short, disaster! I scrapped that draft and started again: new setting, old characters, different plot. This time it wasn’t terrible and that version made it all the way through to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards semi-finals and, after a revise and resubmit (yip, another rewrite) even landed me my agent!
Then we went on submission and got great feedback and lots of editor suggestions and the manuscript went through yet another overhaul. Are you keeping count? That’s rewrite number 5. Infinitely better, the novel was still missing that special something that made editors jump up and down for it. After years of working on this ms, all the rejection took its toll…
Over the summer, I was supposed to overhaul the ms once again based on editor notes and my own gut feels about what was wrong. I tried, it didn’t work and eventually I quit, shelving it indefinitely. I wrote something else, I edited a new ms that’s currently on sub, I tried not to think about my beloved characters rotting on my hard drive, of the many MANY hours poured into that ms.
Then something odd happened and the characters called to me. I dusted off the word file and started reading and fell in love with my story all over again. But, I knew there were problems. The very first version of this story was New Adult, back before NA was even a thing, so I tried to go back to that. I switched up the POV and New Adultified it. I got almost half way before this happened…
and then this…
and finally…
I had butchered it. The characters weren’t real anymore. I’d forced, coerced and manipulated them and corrupted the story, turning it into a beat sheet passable, soulless piece of plot work populated with cardboard cut outs. I realised that if I wanted to salvage anything from this story – the essence of my characters – I needed a radically different approach. I scrapped the rewrite, I scrapped the original. I started over from a completely blank page one. And then I did what I never thought I’d ever do. I plotted, not just a little bit but a complete four page outline of what, where, when, how, why and who. Suddenly, I had a story, a new one that I was excited to write. Sure, it borrows some old ideas, but that’s it. And now I am not so much rewriting as just writing, creating a brand new work from the ground up. And this time, I’m less terrified because every time I get stuck, I turn to my outline and go, “of course that’s what happens next.”
I’m only two chapters in so who knows if I’ll ever make it to ‘The End’ but for now I’m all…
How do you handle rewrites?
