I don't believe in rewrites!
Disregarding much of what I wrote in the last blog, let me say that I don't believe a rewrite ever makes a book better, and be rewrite I mean rewrite. If you are fortunate enough to have written a piece that some of your friends have liked and that you can read over years later and mostly enjoy then you are 95% done with your manuscript, and should light one up, take off your shoes, and hire a copy editor to clean it up. To me, rewrites have been one of the greatest wastes of time ever except that they test the original manuscript and make me totally sure of my success or failure, but it's a test that I wouldn't recommend and often wonder why I bother doing it at all, save for some major insecurities.
My "childhood story" has been done for about 9 years now and yet I've tried radically changing it a couple of times and nothing has come of this, or so little it boggles the imagination. I'll admit that every unfinished manuscript could use a detail or two, not to mention one more line of great dialogue, but this is not a rewrite, but rather a touch up job, or a rewrite in the lightest way imaginable. I did add a couple of paragraphs in the newest version of my childhood story but I'd wanted to add those for a good 8 years so it's not like this was a revelation to me.
The reason I think rewrites are a waste of time is that if you have a story to tell and really attack it with precision then there is no way you are ever going to do better.
My "childhood story" has been done for about 9 years now and yet I've tried radically changing it a couple of times and nothing has come of this, or so little it boggles the imagination. I'll admit that every unfinished manuscript could use a detail or two, not to mention one more line of great dialogue, but this is not a rewrite, but rather a touch up job, or a rewrite in the lightest way imaginable. I did add a couple of paragraphs in the newest version of my childhood story but I'd wanted to add those for a good 8 years so it's not like this was a revelation to me.
The reason I think rewrites are a waste of time is that if you have a story to tell and really attack it with precision then there is no way you are ever going to do better.
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Robert
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Oct 31, 2017 08:04AM
Perhaps you can 'attack it with precision' and compose a tale to your satisfaction. If so, full marks to you! Personally, when rereading and reviewing my book - The Dive - after some time and reflection I found that there were improvements and refinements that I didn't think of when I first self-published it. It might be that I hadn't given it enough thought before having it printed, but 4 years seemed long enough at the time. Later, I found what became 338 details and lines of dialogue that could use touching up. Those were enough to justify spending the 400 or so dollars that it cost to have it reprinted. Even now, if I felt like shelling out that kind of dough I know I could find about a 100 or so more tweakings that I might do if I were so inclined. But that's just me; each to their own as far as what works best.
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Thanks for this Robert, and please know that I thoroughly believe in a good copy editor to not only correct grammatical mistakes but to chime in on lines of dialogue that don't work, could be written better, etc., but to me that's different than a "rewrite." To me, a rewrite is when you take a paragraph or a section of a book, say, about a football game, and then you decide that you could write the WHOLE thing better, while staying on the same subject. So, I guess to me, the intent of a rewrite is the same as the original draft, but the actual writing, which of course is how a writer is remembered, is totally different. What I've found in myself is that this kind of rewrite takes the passion out of the prose, or the music that brought it into existence, and substitutes it for a bland retelling of the same event, without any of the accidentally joys of the original. I accept that a book needs a good edit or four (lol) but that's different than basically starting from scratch.My basic take is that if you've written a good enough draft of a story to publish then you are basically done with the heavy lifting, though I seem inclined to rewrite whole manuscripts to lesser effect, and have wasted a lot of time doing this. I think part of this has to do with a desire to be endlessly perfect, or to say more than I said, but you are a writer and know that a good story doesn't mean that you include every last detail your mind remembers, even if they are good, but that you tell enough to tell the story. In some ways, the form or structure of a tale is like a glass and it only holds so much water.
To be fair to myself, I do think that artists need to challenge their work and if you are seriously considering publication then it is probably a good idea to make sure you've done something as well as you could, and a bad rewrite will definitely make this clear. I'm sure if I had a literary agent, a publisher, etc., that they would put the reins on me and tell me that a manuscript was a good and that it only needed some polishing, or an editor would go over it with me and tell me how to improve it, without destroying the poetry that excited anyone in the first place, even if that anyone is me. But I'm writing in a vacuum and left to my own devices.
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