Writing is rewriting is retyping

Dear indie author,

You may be wondering why I haven’t gotten round to reviewing
your book, yet- even although I have read most of the ones I’ve been sent. I am
currently in the middle of a massive retyping effort, and wanted to
procrastinate about it further by telling you about it :)

I have the manuscript for a new novel, and all I’ve been
doing for the last week and a half is typing the damn thing out again. The idea
initially came from my GR friend Lixian who mentioned that one of her favourite
authors, Kazuo Ishiguro, types out his manuscripts 4 times. I don’t know if I
have that stamina, but it makes sense that if you want a story to last a while,
you’re prepared to spend a bit more time on it after it appears done.

Retyping is awesome and I wanted to share with you why:

- Feels like cheating: you know that weird half-hearted
feeling you get when you write a first draft of something and it doesn’t quite
feel like what’s in your head? And you pick and pick at scenes, adding and
subtracting? Well, finally, you get to go back and write it out perfectly for
the first time, at a rate of like 7k words a day, without research, without
doubt about what comes next! Unbelievable!

- Low energy, high quality: If you have a complete, edited
manuscript, it’s undeniable that most of your work is done. Re-typing is like
the victory lap that caps what’s already a success :D However, re-typing is not
a no-energy endeavour, and if you feel yourself typing on autopilot, you should
take a break :)

- What the hell is “rewriting?” I don’t really know. But
what could be a more guaranteed method of “rewriting” than re-typing your
entire manuscript?

“Dear Leo, writing… is re-writing”

“What’s re-writing?”

“I don’t know”

“Cool well I literally rewrote the whole thing so stfu”

- Corrects any imaginable fault in writing: whenever you
hear an author talking about their process, their daily word counts, how long
they leave a manuscript in a drawer for… this is all fluff. It’s just a thing
to say, but it doesn’t matter all that much. You know intuitively when a thing
is done. If, for example, you took too long away from the story or a big break
half way through writing it or wrote sometimes at night/ sometimes during the
day or whatever, retyping a manuscript over a number of consecutive days will
ensure narrative flow from beginning to end and fix any perceivable problem
with your text that may have been induced by erraticism in its construction. You’ll
fix problems you didn’t even realise your text had when you see how completely detached
retyping makes you to any given sentence, description, thing a character says,
whatever! Any and all of it can be changed, discarded, re-ordered. For this
reason it is sometimes recommended to read your story aloud, and I would
recommend this also, but in this case, the old content still exists. I’ve found
that through general editing/ re-drafting, scenes contain all the ingredients I
want them to, but they could arrive in a smoother order. This makes sense when
your scene began from nothing and proceeded in a single direction into unknown
territory, but now that the whole thing is there, you can re-visit, replace,
restructure. And you will spot more opportunities for re-ordering by re-typing
because naturally you will become accustomed to how a scene looks and become
passive in your observation of it. But retyping demands active observation of
your entire text, and easily offers you the chance to solve anything you think
could be done better. This reordering of ingredients is something that does not
and cannot occur to me unless I retype the thing and get an intimate sense of
what is supposed to come next.

- I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: what better test
of the conviction you have for each sentence than seeing whether or not you’d
happily write it again?

- Works for all writing efforts: it doesn’t really matter
what you’re trying to achieve with your writing, typing it back out again will
improve it. I get that for a first draft, during the best parts of the process,
you type as if the story is flowing through you, as if your fingers are flying
on the keys independent of you. That’s great, and none of that energy or
content is going away: it is simply improved upon. I really enjoy listening to
Terrence McKenna’s lectures on Youtube and in one of them he explains how, on
DMT, elves convince him to sing objects into existence through glossolalia.
Cool, but surely if he were to write a song about that experience for me to
understand, the lyrics wouldn’t be “aoefliuh gurghløielge hg kejhgseiubvkr”? Or
maybe they would- I haven’t decided. I’ll see what I think when I retype it! Even
if you’re doing some wild experimental thing/ capturing a stream of
consciousness or whatever, remember that the people who introduced these
techniques likely wrote them out longhand in notebooks and then went to the
typewriter, and then discovered an error and so used the only method available
back then to correct it: typing the whole thing out again. Re-typing is
reverting to the way stories were written before computers. I can’t remember the
last time I googled something by spelling it correctly, for example- it wastes
time! But written stories of all variety are private, meditative considered
things, and the good ones flow easily- or juxtapose or jar easily: whatever the
intent is- no matter the direction or content. Good stories deserve every
effort to ensure these features.

- Reach new heights: every time you release something, you’re
telling your reader it’s the best you can do. So I imagine that the idea of retyping,
for those who haven’t done it before (myself included) will initially be met
with cynicism. If someone thinks they can achieve their best without retyping,
why would they spend so much time on a lengthy exercise to improve it? I know
you would never release a story if you could possibly imagine how to make it
better. But that’s why retyping is fun: previously unimaginable improvements
come to you.

- Get high on your own stories! Retpying is the closest you
can come to discovering your completed story as a new reader. Because the full
thing is there, but each new page does not yet exist until you type it out.
What could be better? Before you write for others, you get to write for
yourself!!

Don’t believe me? Yeah well you wouldn’t, would you?! Lol I
have yet another manuscript that I plan to retype, and later on I will show you
a comparison scene and step-by-step explanation of the changes I made so you
can see how it works.

I would recommend retyping to everyone, and from here on in,
I won’t consider any project of mine completed unless I’ve typed it out in its
entirety at least once. I owe it to myself and my readers :D

Thanks for reading!

For Goodreaders: when my Tumblr posts make it to Goodreads,
the format goes weird. I don’t know why and apologies, but thanks for making it
this far anyways :D