Rewrites

Writing was a very painful experience up until my mid-20's when I decided to stop working over a line of poetry for weeks straight to no avail. I mostly believed in the madness of my mind, and was spurred on by the Beat notion of "first thought, best thought." I fantasized about writing a whole book on LSD one day in Golden Gate Park, and thought if I hit the exact right day in the bull's eye that this was possible. I'm not even sure that I expected this book I'd write to be any good because it had to be out of sheer passion.

I wrote three to five novels in my twenties depending on your point of view, and all of them were unreadable. The first one used dash marks instead of punctuation, and while the next few strove for punctuation, my grammar was so bad that to say they need a copy editor would be kind. I would edit these books but not in the same painstaking way that I used to go about my poetry with, and kept most of the lines intact. I guess I tried shaping the manuscript some with paragraph breaks, and grammatical corrections, but I'm not sure I'd call it rewriting as much as tinkering.

My first success as an author, "If So Carried by the Wind," was written in one spurt and basically typed up straight from the notebooks. Like with my other manuscripts, I edited it for shape, but there was no rewrite, or not what I'd consider one. I tried adding one paragraph of description that was pointless and that's all I remember. I shuffled paragraphs, and may have changed a line or two of dialogue, but there really wasn't a rewrite, or shouldn't have been one. The truth is I massively rewrote it right after Casey, my mentor, and the antagonist of the book, told me it needed some work. I gutted the prose and the tone to what Stan Rice referred to as a "New York Times description of a book, but not the book itself." I did this for a lot of bad reasons, but the primary one was I'd never done a rewrite before, or been asked to, and didn't know what to do.

I don't think a rewrite ever does anything more than build on an already successful start with a manuscript. It serves the original, rather than the other way around, like a storyteller filling in a story that has real feeling. This is sometimes hard for writers because getting in the mood of the original story written in a different mood can be hard to access and then the prose sounds all fucked up.

I'm working on my first real rewrite right now, and it has gone through three mutations: 1) I wrote the original in the fall of 2008, and got some good reviews. 2) I gutted this in 2014 and basically did to it what I did to "If So Carried by the Wind," and the only good that came out of this was that it lead me back to the original. 3) I rewrote it in the summer of 2016 in less than two months, and that is basically the version I am going with now.

So, what to say about my most successful rewrite? For starters, I wrote it almost eight years after the original, so there was plenty of distance and perspective, not that I recommend this, but the manuscript had sat like a fine wine. Secondly, I had a good reread of it in the late summer before I had committed to doing a rewrite and was happy enough with it, but something in me thought I should give it one more crack. I was trying to make it as good as I could for my collaborator, an old friend, so that in some ways I was writing the rewrite for him and this may be the magic ingredient that made it better, partly because he wasn't asking me to do this, so I was sharing our childhood out of love. Before hitting the manuscript, I made a structural breakthrough by shortening every paragraph of the original, or breaking it in half, and freeing up space for more stories. I told myself that I was only going to rewrite when I was inspired and finished it in a about a month and a half, before sending it to Josh.

Writing is rewriting is a cliche and yet one that haunts all writers for everything is tinkered with if not rewritten and that's implied. My cautionary tale for all writers is that if you have written a piece worthy of a rewrite it means that you have really broken the ice and got something pure down on the page, a miracle, and that this should be remembered. We can all be better in our art and life, but sometimes art only allows you to venture so far and to accept the imperfections with the gems.