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Advice on Rewriting

“Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”
-Samuel Johnson

I’m not a writer but a rewriter. I think a lot of fiction writers are like that whether they admit it or not. In some ways it is the dissatisfied among us that create art. If you look at a first draft and think, “wow, I’m done, that’s a gem, I’m a genius,” your work is doomed to the dustbin. The genius of fiction writing is in seeing what’s wrong, because if you can see what’s wrong, you can fix it, then fix it again, and again and again. In fact, it might never be done in your eyes, but it may well become a gem.

Rewriting, polishing improving are the bulk of a writer’s time. And that’s great news. It means you can create as many “crappy” first drafts as you like. Don’t worry about what you’re getting down, you can always improve it. Remember you’re not a writer but a rewriter, so just get something out so you can focus on the real work of improving it. And once its time for that real work, take it seriously.

With that in mind, here is some advice on the most important of fiction practices: Rewriting.

Once you’ve got a draft complete, print out your manuscript and reread it pen in hand. Write and change as you go, mark it up, mess it up, delete, move, add, reword. Do that a few times. Now try it on the computer screen. Look over it in pixels. It may look different and open new doors for you. Now print it out again. Now leave it for a bit. Alternate and try different approaches to rewriting. Reread your manuscript in bits and pieces, from the middle, in paragraphs out of order, see what perspective that brings. Try setting the MS aside entirely and rewriting it from scratch. You’ve always got the original to go back to so just try to write it from memory again. You’ll find new things in the story which you can use even if you go back to the original draft.

Rewrite the story until it’s driving you nuts.  Don’t read it or even think about it for a month. Now come back to it. Work on it again. While you might consider asking a friend or fellow writer to read it, wait until it’s ready. Make it all you can make it before sharing it. There’s no point in asking someone else to point out problems you already know about.

Here are some tips, some things to look for when reading and re-writing your MS:

• Any unnecessary or repeated words or phrases
• POV switches
• Clichés
• Passive sentences
• Telling the reader what someone’s not doing
• Passive protagonist
• Telling that should be showing (about a character, about an important moment, key conflict points).
• Consolidate scenes that impart the same information or same idea as another,
• Consolidate characters that serve the same purpose or could be consolidated into one (why does your protag need two friends?)
• Ask how you could ratchet up conflict, how you could enhance it
• What are the stakes, how could you increase them?
• What if… (run through all the possible what if scenarios, let your imagination wander, what if your protagonist was a woman, was gay, was a dog, was the mother not the sister, was in love with the boy instead of angry at him etc.)
• Write down what you want the story to be about. If this is your ideal, are you meeting it?
• Try it from a different point of view, try third person or first, try it from a different perspective.
• If in first person, cut all the I’s you can. It’s tempting to say “I this and I that,” but it gets to be too much.
• Ask yourself: whose story is it? Does your answer surprise you? Is it reflected in the MS?
• Ask what protagonist wants, ask what’s stopping the protagonist. Always ask these questions.
• Ask: would your characters really think like this, would your character really talk like this?
• Allow your character to grow. Don’t box yourself in with a defined character at the start.
• Force your characters to make choices. The tougher the better.
• Can you use gossip, can you use confession (in this way we learn about both character talked about and character speaking).
• Avoid commenting on how a thing is said or how a thing is done. Let the action or the dialogue or whatever it is stand on its own.
• Remember what someone’s observing says as much about that character as it does about the object observed. This means your words are doing double duty, and it’s a powerful tool. Can you put even more weight on them, allowing a character’s observations to do triple duty?
• Put your characters in painful places and difficult situations, expose them, put them in conflict, give them challenges. Now do it again only more so. Ratchet it up.
• Avoid “LY” endings in any use, dialogue or action.
• Careful of ING words for action. “ing” often is not needed. Make it into an “as” or just drop the “ing”
• Avoid half told stories. Avoid trying to suck in the reader by offering tantalizing bits. The reader may get frustrated if you don’t deliver.
• Are your flashbacks really needed? Try and move it into your “now” story instead of as flashback. New writers often use it to explain motivation and backstory. Most likely it’s not even needed and is just helping you as a writer understand how your characters got here.
• Don’t let your narrator or your characters preach to the reader.
• Consider subtext, what’s unsaid. Every piece of dialogue should operate on multiple levels.
• Watch out for characters saying literally what they feel or mean. Allow some shades of possibility.
• Avoid repetition in dialogue
• Read your manuscript out loud, record it, listen to it, read it to a friend (having someone listen is way better than just reading it to yourself. You’ll feel a hot rush of embarrassment when things aren’t right on the page.)
• Use things you find in other people’s writing. Free yourself to steal lines. As you rewrite they will change. What started as theft will genuinely become your own line.
• Study other writers. Pick your three favourite writers that are doing something similar to you. Read snippets from each before you sit down to read yours. Reread these work and note the structure of their stories, note the elements of craft. Observe their dialogue, their scenes and exposition, the description, opening, ending, character development etc. What can you imitate, what can you learn? Copy their sentence structure, write out a passage word for word and study it.

Got re-writing advice of your own? Email me, I’d love to hear it: daniel@danielgriffin.ca