Drafts, Rewrites, etc.

For every book there is always a first draft, or a birth. The first draft is the vision (thesis), the voice (style), and the structure (narrative). I think most of the writing is done in the first draft, but not all. There is also a necessary second draft to correct grammatical mistakes, add a detail or two, or maybe even a paragraph, but not much more than this. It has always been my dream that I'd write a first draft so good that all it would need was a little professional cleaning up and my job as a writer would be done, but it hasn't been that easy for me, or any writer. The word "rewrite" has to be one of the most horrifying for any writer because it implies the first draft wasn't good enough and to make it better the book needs to be written again. But why would someone rewrite something that was already done? It's a good question.

If you break down the idea that a first draft is the vision, voice, and structure of the book then it is possible that it can have one or two of these ingredients but utterly be missing the third. I can imagine stories that have such a good thesis or idea a reader licks his lips, but the style is so bad that the idea needs to be fleshed out. But it would be hard to imagine a book with no thesis or structure wooing someone enough with style to require a rewrite. In this case, I think it would be good advice for the writer to write something new with a thesis and structure because their style is intact. But in general I'd imagine any book requiring a rewrite would have enough vision, style, and structure, to elicit such a thankless job, and yes I said thankless.

I am one of those writers who loathes rewrites and the very idea makes my skin crawl. My basic bitch against them is that a rewrite mostly has to do with style and the voice of a piece is hard to duplicate, if not impossible. I didn't write any rewrites for the unreadable books of my twenties. I'd usually do a second draft and correct whatever grammatical mistakes I could given my poor skills as a grammarian, but after that I was done. My idea was that the book had already lived through me and passed onto another dimension free of me, so any tinkering with it was absurd. Another problem was that the books may not have had a compelling enough thesis (vision) to even warrant a rewrite, though a friend of mine once wanted to turn one of them into a screenplay on the thesis alone, but we never did it.

So, what is a rewrite? The best way I can put it is that the reader reads what's on the page and he/she isn't thinking of whether what they are reading is rewritten or not. They are really only existing on the page along with the writer and it's not their job to think of all the work that went into the book, so they shouldn't be able to tell what is rewritten or not, so the rewrite has to cop the original style to a degree and this is hard for a writer. It can only happen through immersion and speaking from experience when I've finished birthing a book the last thing I want to do is think about it for the next year or two, so in many ways the whole task is for the reader and publication, or so it would seem. I really can't imagine rewriting a book only for myself.

The first book I really did an edit on was "If So Carried by the Wind," but it didn't go well. I'd never done anything more than a cursory second draft mostly based on grammar, but soon learned that there was even more to a second draft: it also required shuffling sentences, paragraphs, and a general reworking of narrative structure, however lightly done. But not even this was a rewrite, so when I was asked to do one, I thought the goal was to literally rewrite an already existing novella into creation and to rebirth it, but this was never the goal. A rewrite ALWAYS serves the first draft otherwise there would be no point to doing one, but I missed this lesson. I thought the style (voice) had to be rewritten along with everything else, when really I may have needed nothing more than a slightly hyped up second draft. I'm not sure if I would've learned this as a graduate student in an M.F.A. program because I was a creative writing major and never got this kind of lesson, but it wasn't a very good program.

As far as I can tell, a rewrite adds depth to an already birthed manuscript or else it's just polishing a turd. I can imagine that every writer has a different process for doing a rewrite but at its simplest it's realizing that you left something out of your narrative that you'd like to tell, or that you told something but weren't happy with how you told it, and it ends there. I really don't think a rewrite is more than this. It's not reshaping the entire structure of the story because that probably comes in the first draft, or the second, and it's not finding a voice because that also happens in the first draft, and if it doesn't then you are really not rewriting a piece but starting from scratch, a new birth.

I did a rewrite this fall but fell into a common trap for me of thinking I'd literally rewritten the whole novel to better effect, but I was wrong. I really was only rewriting, or filling in the canvas. Much of my rewrite wasn't very good, but some of it was, and I hope (fingers crossed) that I made some poorly written paragraphs better, and added some details to make the story richer, but not much else. A rewrite is never the birth of a novel, but rather the reflection of the birth through an imaginary reader begging for more. I did have to immerse in the original to get to the point to be able to do this but once done it was a fun process, not unlike writing a novel for the first time, so I must've mistaken the feeling of good writing for vision and structure, but those two components already existed. True to me, I had to test the waters and make sure they already existed by arranging a month long rewrite into a presumably new novel, but it was so inferior to the original it wouldn't be worth describing. I really thought a month of writing was worthless, but I now see that I was intuitively coloring in the manuscript for posterity, publishers, readers, and friends.

I don't know how long a first and second draft have to sit before a writer can go in on a rewrite, but I'd imagine at least six months to a year to get over the birth, but in my case it was longer. I mostly believe in the idea that a piece of writing is done after a second draft that can include some rewriting, but not a lot, or as much as I just did. A good editor could probably help with this by reading a first draft and having the writer walk with them through the minor changes and additions a manuscript needs, and then you're done, but this might be hopeful.

It's not a great metaphor, but rewriting is a little bit like being an ace relief pitcher coming into face one batter in a game that has its own momentum. They didn't create the momentum, and the draft of the game has already been written, so in some ways it's unfair to expect so much of them, but we do. We expect them to come in and write one great paragraph or sentence to fill in what we've seen for nine innings, and they have to do this with absolutely no get up and go. All of the other players on the team have a chance to prove themselves throughout the game but not the pinch hitter, or relief pitcher, so it's a special kind of job. In some ways, it's no different than writing a first draft because every pitcher or writer has their good days, but they are not radically changing the structure of the game (the narrative).

I never thought of it this way before but to play out the baseball metaphor a first draft is like a pitcher going nine innings, or maybe eight, and then a reliever coming in to do some second draft work. A rewrite would be more like a pitcher leaving the game earlier and then expecting a lot of pitchers to fill in a paragraph or two, so at least in baseball we live in the age of the rewrite.