WTF is a Rewrite?

Since it’s not enough to just proofread the first draft of a novel, here’s what I’ve learned of the process.

I don’t know what it means to do a rewrite of my novel(s).

I have written two full manuscripts and I’m a third of the way, each, into two more. That’s four novels on the go, none of which I’d let anybody read.

I could use some direction.

I’ve consulted some books that have offered a path and I’ll share what I’ve learned, so far.

Great at starting things.

I’m good at getting going. It’s exciting to write when an idea is fresh and new. Follow through has never been my strength. The first time that I set out to write a novel and actually got to the end of the first draft I was thrilled. I mean, I’d written a damn novel, right? I’d finished something!

I’d already started another story during a period of boredom with the first manuscript, so I promptly put the one I’d finished ‘in the drawer’ while I continued work on the next one. I’d get back to the first one in due time, do whatever one does, next, to their first draft.

Three years later I have two full first draft manuscripts, plus the other two that are well on their way.

In creating these stories I’ve processed some inner demons, created characters I care about, and used them to populate worlds that I feel a part of. I’m unclear, however, on what to do next. These creations I dedicated so many hours to are not yet worthy of public consumption.

I’ve taken a couple of intensive workshops on creative writing, and some basic composition courses back in university. While they offered a lot of help on writing mechanics for a finished product, and on editing, in general, I have absorbed scant information on what to do with a first draft, other than, well, edit it.

Editing. Fixing errors, improving word choices, maybe eliminating repetition?

None of that sounds like a rewrite. Rewrite sounds like writing it again, not fixing what’s written.

This frightens me.

Why not just edit what you’ve got?

This is because the first draft may not, yet, contain the whole story.

I went to a print shop to get one of my manuscripts put on paper so that I could read it all in one shot, away from the computer screen. It started well, and I did like the ending. In the middle I wanted to get a job, it was so boring.

In his book the Weekend Novelist Re-Writes the Novel: A Step-by-Step Guide to Perfecting Your Work, Robert J. Ray writes, “When you wrote your rough draft, there’s a high probability that you spent most of your writing energy developing the plot, the path of your protagonist.”

I can relate to this. As I’m ‘discovering’ the story, which is what writing the first draft feels like to me, I am mostly writing out what happens to the main character. The first manuscript I wrote barely even has an antagonist. Ray’s solution, which I’ll go into deeper, is to take a look at the other characters and their motivations to shore up the structure of the story.

Alan Watt, in The 90 Day Re-Write: The Process of Revision, suggests that characters need to have a dilemma to keep the reader’s interest. He writes, “In fact, the dilemma is the source of our story, and it is from this place that all tension and conflict arise.” He goes on, “It offers clues to what still needs to be rewritten and leads us to the most effective order of events.”

Looking at the dilemma(s) each character must face will fill in the story gaps that made me want to quit writing, altogether, when I finally sat down to read the rough draft of the first novel I’d written.

What to do if character and tension are lacking and the story is boring?

Alan Watt offers a rewrite process that is broken down into 90 one-day increments. Robert J. Ray presents a roadmap that facilitates a rewrite over the course of 17 weekends.

Watt has you start by looking at the main character’s dilemma (the difficult choice, preferably between two bad options, they find themselves forced to make), then having an antagonist play off of that dilemma. Giving characters difficult choices rather than having things happen to them, allows the reader to relate. This will make them want to keep reading.

I was at this point in applying Watt’s process to my own novel when I took a look at Ray’s method, which I ended up switching over to. I may return to Watt’s approach later, as another pass to improving the story, but I found Ray’s method resonated more with me. Before I get into Ray’s method, some general first steps in addressing the rewrite.

I’ve heard many times that the first thing to do, after finishing a rough draft, is to put it away. In his book On Writing, Stephen King says for six weeks. Others say to put the manuscript away for even longer.

When you do take it back out of the drawer, perhaps after having written something else that you found exciting, a common suggestion is to read it in one sitting. One day, if possible. Some say you should just sit back and take the story in, no marking it up or overthinking. Read it as a reader.

If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings than it is to kill your own. — Stephen King, in On Writing

Ray recommends reading the manuscript with a mind to characters and objects. I went through mine and listed out all of the characters that I came into contact with. I was shocked at how many there were. I also listed any objects that I discovered I’d (unintentionally) associated the characters with. Ray suggests that all characters be associated with an object and that all scenes have objects associated. Figuring this out fills more holes in the story.

I took my surprisingly long list of characters and Ray had me decide which ones were primary so that I could then look at their role in the story. They each need to have their own transformation, arc, or dilemma. You’ve possibly heard this before.

Labeling these characters as either helpers or antagonists made me realize that I, again, had written a story with no antagonists. I had to find a way to make some of these characters oppose my protagonist. I did this by looking at their stories and giving them a purpose for living, rather than randomly appearing to further the plot for my main character.

Creating full arcs for each participant in the story is allowing me to have interesting things happen in that long painful stretch of pages that made my manuscript so boring.

Next steps

A first draft is an unfinished product for more reasons than that it needs to be proofread. It isn’t just the words that need to be rewritten. The story needs to be reworked. This means flushing out the characters and their journeys. Ultimately, this could mean at least one literal rewriting of the story, which still scares me.

I remember being fed an online ad for Neil Gaiman’s master class on writing where he says, “The process of writing your second draft is the process of making it look like you knew what you were doing all along.”

I’m starting to get this concept.

I wish I could say that I’ve gotten all the way through either Ray’s or Watt’s processes and now have a completed novel. I still feel kind of stuck, but I’m going to trust the process. At some point, I’ll have enough redeveloped story arising from my rough draft to rewrite it better.

I imagine that this process, like anything, takes practice.

I look forward to a time when the reworking of a story becomes second nature and I can come to enjoy the rewrite as much as I do the creation of the initial draft.