This may not sound like a continuation of the beginning-middle-end sequence I have going on in these posts, but it is. Because this is where the writer has a chance to solve some of the problems that came up in the first draft, especially if the story ran off-course to somewhere more interesting in mid-book (whether that’s the Mines of Moria or Los Angeles) or developed an unexpected major issue (like the ending falling flat).
Rewriting has given writers a number of sayings to live by, including “Writing is rewriting,” “Authors dislike being edited, but they dislike not being published even more,” “Murder your darlings,” “You don’t have to be a good writer as long as you’re an excellent re-writer,” and “Don’t get it write, get it written. Then make it right.” In other words, that first, divinely inspired draft that you wrote at 3 a.m. in which every comma is made of gold, and that you can’t imagine improving? It needs revising. (Though probably not for a couple of weeks, until the shine of getting a working draft down so fast/easily wears off.)
Still, calling revising/rewriting simple “a necessary evil” downplays its value to writers. Even if one tears through the first draft at a blistering pace, it takes a while to type or handwrite a novel. Few writers can hang on to every detail of a novel over the course of weeks, let alone months or years. The rewrite is where one can read the whole manuscript at one sitting, which allows one to spot the place in Chapter One where the protagonist is described as blonde, or a virtuoso violinist, or really interested in skiing, and then spot the place in Chapter Fifteen where said protagonist is dark-haired, or comments that they’ve always wanted to play the violin, or doesn’t know the difference between cross-country and downhill skis.
There’s another saying about revising that’s appropriate here, which is that you can only see the book you should have written after you have reached the end of the first draft. Rewriting is the chance to make the first draft into that book. Sometimes, this is a major project, involving things like changing the protagonist, the main plot line, and half the characters. Sometimes, it’s not quite such a major project, involving “merely” ironing out major plot/setting/characterization/structure/pacing issues in the story one has told. Sometimes it’s not even a big deal, objectively—just a series of tweaks and microwriting-level changes.
Regardless of the amount of revising that will be required, and the apparent size of the changes that will be necessary, rewriting never feels easy to begin with. I think this is because it requires a different—and much more flexible—mindset from getting the first draft down.
In the first draft, I’m focused on getting “the story” down on the page; part of the point is to not get too distracted unless I am clearly having a better idea about what is supposed to happen. In the second draft, I have to relax and let go of the story I told. I have to let the “butterfly effect” ripple through the draft. Sometimes, I add a line of dialog to a character in Chapter One, and by the time that ripples through to Chapter Twenty, that character has been promoted from minor to major character (solving a plot problem along the way). Sometimes, I realize that the character grumbling in Chapter Ten could be the traitor I need in Chapter Eighteen, if I plant a couple of comments in the early chapters and continue to develop the character along those lines. Sometimes, an absolutely-required event in Chapter Twenty needs foreshadowing or set-up earlier, and I have to drop steadily developing hints through the beginning and middle of the story until said event is inevitable, without making it too obvious that it’s coming.
In other words, rewriting isn’t just looking about improving what is already there. It’s also about recognizing what could or should be added, changed, or subtracted to make everything cooler.
Which is not to say that “first-draft issues” aren’t important. The Book One Should Have Written may be addressing those issues by completely revamping the plot, characters, and/or worldbuilding…but it may also be a straightforward jump into repairing major issues that got overlooked because of the tunnel-vision focus on getting to the end of Draft #1.
Common first-draft writing issues include:
- Explicitly or implicitly promising the reader something and then breaking that promise into tiny pieces.
- Missing set-up, especially explanations that the writer knows, but that didn’t get down on the page.
- Apparent inconsistencies in characterization of major characters.
- Apparent inconsistencies in the background, culture, worldbuilding, and so on.
- Plot problems: holes, contradictions, inconsistencies, out-of-left-field developments, predictability, too-easy, too-hard, etc.
- Issues with pacing (too fast or too slow), style, theme, or structure.
I think I’ve done posts about most of the above points before, but I’m always happy to revisit them, because they’re complicated. Some of them overlap—missing set-up can be the root cause of many plot and characterization problems, for instance. There are also quite a few micro-writing issues that I’m not dealing with here, like noticing that one is using 17 semi-colons on one double-spaced manuscript page, or that one has repeated the phrase “they were finally able to do it” at least twice in every chapter, when “they finally did it” or “they succeeded at last” would work just as well. I usually leave the “favorite microwriting mistakes” pass for the end of the rewrite, so that I don’t have to think about them while I’m doing major rewrites (like moving scenes around or adding a chapter).
Thank you so much! This post makes me feel a LOT better about the unexpected turns my WIP has been making in revisions!
Some stories are just like that. Some writers are just like that (meaning, they work like this all the time).
A few of my first-draft issues are:
o Wanting to put in excessive set-up, to make sure the reader understands it all.
o My back-brain placing limits on how bad the first draft can be.
o A tendency for the first-draft plot to set like concrete, once written down.
Often, when I get a better idea, I have to dump the entire first-draft-so-far and start a new first draft as a completely new story. Sometimes I can manage a “I always meant to do that” revision, and sometimes doing so is relatively easy. Other times, not so much.
As an aside, I’ll note that Tolkien did put in hints, in the final draft, that Moria had always been an option.
Possibly you need to look at your issues earlier, or in smaller chunks? I find that when I am doing my initial plot summary, the backstory and first chapter or two are fairly clear, but the overall plotline gets more and more general the further along it goes. That makes it necessary (and possible) to stop every couple of chapters to figure out the details of the next bit…and also makes it possible for my original plotline to change significantly (because “the heroes confront the villains in a lonely warehouse in London” sounds quite specific, but is actually easy for the butterfly effect to gradually turn into “the heroes confront the villains in a crowded country hunting lodge” as things develop over 300 pages or more). If your writing isn’t flexible once it’s written down, then logically any plot or characterization flexibility/changes have to happen before you write them down in their first/final form. Making room in your process for this to happen is the hard part.
Few writers can hang on to every detail of a novel over the course of weeks, let alone months or years. The rewrite is where one can read the whole manuscript at one sitting, which allows one to spot the place…
Weirdly, I seem to be better able to hold the whole thing in my head whilst writing than I can when rereading. Whether this is cause, effect, or coincidence of me writing pretty clean first drafts but having a gawdawful horrible time making significant changes afterward, I couldn’t say, but at least it seems consistent.
Even the one book where I thoroughly failed to stick the landing, I knew even as I was writing it that the end wasn’t working; I was just so sick of the blasted thing by that point that I slapped it down anyway so I could type “the end”. And it still sits there, occasionally sticking its tongue out at me. I know why it doesn’t work — lack of set-up for the twist I was trying to pull off — but years later I still can’t figure out what to actually do to fix it.
I stare in bafflement at writers who make huge changes to plot, characters, etc. in revisions. I know it works that way for a lot of people, but my brain just flails at the whole concept. It’s not the same story if you do that!
That’s why I make the point about trying to be flexible. When the writer is flexible varies with writing process. For writers whose prose sets up like concrete once it’s written, or who fixate on a particular plotline, the flexibility has to come before everything solidifies. For me, and lots of other writers, the flexibility almost has to happen after the first draft, when I can see where it needs to be. You are baffled by people making big revision changes; I’m baffled by people who don’t need to do that. Possibly it is a function of how one defines “the same story.” I want a story that works, and while making major changes to a story that isn’t working quite right is, technically, making it “not the same story,” that doesn’t bother me if “the same story” didn’t work and “not the same story” does work.
I think my back-brain must do most of the flexibility for me, while it’s still doing whatever it does to generate the story. Good back-brain!
I have had to flex (f’rex the plot that absolutely depended on Kim Jong-il staying alive and in charge of North Korea), but I really, really didn’t enjoy it, and it took my brain a long time to come around about it.
When it comes to keeping things straight over the course of a novel…
I wrote one where my viewpoint character was from the frontier, and he’d say things like, “I ain’t reckonin’ on no such thing, ma’am, and nobody best think so neither.”
His partner was from the same little settlement – but her family was a bit more refined. If she’d said the same sentence back at him, it would’ve been, “I’m not reckonin’ on any such thing, sir, and don’t anybody say different.”
Then I had the ones not from the frontier, and the British ones. Keeping all that straight started giving me a headache!
Yes, that sort of thing can be a pain to keep track of, but it’s relatively easy to check, because the writer made a clear, upfront decision about who sounds like what. You just have to stick to it, and it’s easy to tell when you haven’t. Spur-of-the-moment background and unplanned throwaway details are harder to remember (or spot later), and I, at least, cannot make up all the tiny, apparently pointless details (“He only has raspberry jam on his toast at breakfast when he’s in a good mood”) in advance. They only come out when I’m writing the actual scene, because that’s the only place where most of them are going to matter at all. Except that one in a hundred or so ends up being vital to the finished plot, and I don’t know which one until the first draft is further along.
I frequently have to drag in beta readers to ensure that all the places where I wasn’t clear enough are caught.