The Write Stuff - Writing Tips To Help You Complete Your Book
Tip #4 - Writing Is Rewriting!

When we’re reading something we particularly love, the perfection of that prose can trick us into thinking it burst word-perfect from the writer. But it didn’t.

An author mentor of mine was fond of saying “the secret to writing is rewriting” and as a beginner it’s probably the best advice I ever got. Rather than springing out perfect the first time, every piece of writing, or every good piece, was the result of many, many, many, many revisions.

The aim of your initial get-it-out-of-you draft is to do just that. Get the story from your head where it exists only as a possibility and birthed onto the screen or page where it exists as… Well, it exists and that’s the important thing. Some of it might actually be good, great even. But a lot of it won’t be the perfect thing you had envisioned. So you begin the rewrite process.

I think about rewriting as travelling down different paths until I find one that gets me to my destination. Until I finally reach that shining city I will write myself into one dead end after another. Those dead ends pile up and the more there are, the more I can get disillusioned that I’ll ever discover the right path.

Just like any trial-and-error exercise, just like any experiment, those dead-ends aren’t wasted time. They’re roads you know not to take the next time. So, as disappointed as I always am when I reach an impasse, I’ve also learned one more way that my story doesn’t want to be told.

And just like any experiment, by taking a moment to consider what in particular isn’t working about them, those previous rewriting efforts will help narrow down the possibilities of what will work. Analyse what exactly is “wrong” in them and you can avoid that issue in your next rewrite.

While a path may have taken you to a dead end, some of the scenery you created along the way may come in handy later on. So hoard up those deleted portions. When removing work to replace it, I paste the excised portions into a separate document. I regularly plunder these outtakes when I’ve realised I can reuse or modify already created scenes.

Rewriting can be arduous and joyless so find ways to make it less so. I often leave notes for Future-Me in the draft, especially in portions I know are rough. “This part is SO bad, Dom. Sorry, you’ll have to fix it. Good luck! You’ll need it.”