Revision Or Rewrite?
You have finished your novel. YAY! Celebrate! Then you take another look at it. Now, even though you’ve tried revising bits and pieces, reworking scenes and paragraphs, something just isn’t right. Perhaps you should consider a rewrite.
Some of the signs are awkward story flow where some characters are concerned. Or plot elements that don’t seem to fit together. Maybe something just bothers you about the story line and you can’t really pin it down. I struggled to make my first book work the way I had originally planned, but I was never satisfied until I was willing to let go of some really bad parts of the story line and do a major rewrite. Once I was willing to do that, it came together the way it was meant to be. Oddly enough, it still followed the original loose outline I had laid out, but this time it worked.
I was trying to take the story where the story wasn’t supposed to go. You know the old adage about fitting a square peg into a round hole? I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to fit my story into a frame it was not suited for. As a result, the characters lacked the crisp, distinctive personalities they deserved and the plot was impossibly convoluted to the point it really defied logic. Yes, I can see all that now, but back then? Are you kidding, I was sure there had to be some way to make it work as it was. I just needed to fix the dialogue, or maybe beef up the descriptions and it would all come together.
Nope, never happened.
Another thing I discovered in the rewrite/revise idea had to do with POV. If your book, or even a single scene, isn’t working the way you want it to try rewriting it from a different character’s POV. You may have to leave off parts of the scene the character didn’t see, but that’s often good. A scene can change dramatically by changing who’s eyes you are looking through. Sometimes even the lack of information through a different character can draw the reader in with thoughts of “oh, but they don’t know about…” and if you have engaged your reader to think such thoughts, you have succeeded. Occasionally, you may discover you need to shift to a new main character completely in order to tell the story the way it wants to be told.
To those writers out there just getting started (and a reminder to the old veterans), this is probably the most difficult thing you will ever do with your writing. Suck it up and be willing to see the flaws for what they are. Understand that just because a scene is powerfully and beautifully written, doesn’t mean it belongs in the story. If you can face your own work with a ruthless delete button and cut it to ribbons to remove the parts that don’t belong, you can then put it back together and polish it till it shines. When you are through, you will have something you are truly ready to send out into the world on it’s own.
Happy Writing – and keep the bandaids handy!
