Let’s be honest: rewriting can be a soul-destroying endeavour. You get to the end of the first draft and a feeling of elation surges through you. It’s done! It’s finished! You have achieved what you set out to do… you have a finished manuscript!
That’s the theory, anyway. In reality I confess I had no moment of ‘Yippeeee!‘. It was more like, ‘Phew. Phase 1 complete. Now the real work begins.‘ Because I had a lot of editing to do… rewriting, in fact, turned out to be a more accurate description.
I have been working for some months on this rewrite. Hammering out the first draft was a slow, painstaking process involving a number of restarts before I finally realised that if I kept starting over, I would never reach the end. I made the decision then and there to just keep going – forget about the sloppy technique or corny dialogue; keep writing and get the story out.
So I did, and once it was out I read it through from start to finish. Oddly enough, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Yet it was nowhere near as good as it could be… and so began the rewrite.
Going back to the beginning, I started at the end, posing the following question:
This is where the characters end up – how did they get there?
From there, I worked backwards, literally scene by scene, until I had firmed up the story spine and structure. Yes, I’m sure this is the long way around but this is my first novel. How was I to know that this is what would work for me? And it has. The rewrite is going well. The whole thing feels more solid.
But oh, my, it is a mammoth task. Some days it feels like I am writing a whole new novel and I wonder, is this just yet another restart? But then I come across a part that really is fine the way it was, or at least requires only minor adjustments to fit in with the rewrites. Gosh, it feels wonderful to add nearly 7,000 words to the manuscript in a single day!
On those days I feel like I’m making progress and I can once again believe that at some point, soon, it really will be finished and then I can have that ‘Yippee!‘ moment and revel in it… at least for as long as it takes before I start on the next one.
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