The thousand and one things of rewriting

There has to be a thousand and one things you do in rewriting and more. Thank God you don't have to do them twice. But it is all those changes that comprise the final draft that hopefully will not come back to you again. And it is the tweeks that change the work. The big work is mostly done but then comes all the nuances that make a novel a novel. The minor changes of one word for another or the addition of a paragraph setting the stage or just the breaking down of dialogue and exposition all change the novel in ways that are immeasurable.

It is really at the end that the glaring moments taunt you. After rewriting something ten times or more you think you have caught the big inconsistencies or mistakes but of course they are the ones that are embedded in the text and your eye has become used to them. When they do make themselves known it is amazing because you have read that passage so many times and never have seen it.

Then you start back through swapping out words deleting sentences, breaking up chapters, combining chapters, fleshing out characters. It is amazing how some scenes stay so thin, so under imagined. So you go back at it and basically rewrite those scenes from the beginning to the end. And then of course you have to read it again to get out all the fat again. Fat is a big one. A paragraph bunches up and literally doesn't look right. Crowded. It looks crowded.

So you thin you fatten. The book is an accordion you expand and contract expand and contract. This goes on for months. This goes on for years. And finally you reach a point where you have completed the thousand and one things and you think that is it. No more. I am finished. Until you discover the one thousand and second.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...the American Dream gone bad

Stuck in a Rewrite Again

Someone once said that you don't become a writer until you learn to rewrite. For most writers rewriting is drudgery. When I first started out I had a bad habit of writing first drafts and then leaving them to sit. Sometimes I went back and other times I didn't. The truth was I didn't want to go back after the thrill ride of the first draft. I felt in some sense I was finished with my novel and that it's merit would shine through to editors. Right.

A hundred rejection letters later I started to buckle down and rewrite. But of course I didn't really know what I was doing. F. Scott Fitzgerald said you don't rewrite to achieve a smooth surface, you rewrite to discover the inner truth of your characters. So I  bought a book called Revising Fiction  and went to work highlighting all the rules. This began a process that lasted for years. For most writers the rewrite is a long arduous process of cutting, condensing, revising, rewriting. The hard part is to re-imagine your book. In a sense you are starting over, but this time you have a road map.

The terror of the first draft is you have no map and have to hack one out through uncharted territory. The terror of the rewrite is there is a road and you are essentially stuck on it for possibly years. Boredom can become an enemy. In my second novel Tobacco Sticks I rewrote for seven years! Of course, I was learning as I went so it became a crazy process of reaching the end and then realizing the beginning now needed to be brought up to the level of the end. This went on for years.

But there does come a point where you know the book is basically finished. You could tweak your work  forever, but that is when you have to know that you are essentially rewriting for yourself. So you finish your rewrite and are free once again to pursue a new first draft. Of course then you will be stuck in another rewrite. 

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in September. www.billhazelgrove.com