On her Blog Notes from the Slush Pile, my friend Candy talks about the process of rewriting a novel. Candy is a journalist and in her Blog she tells us what other authors have said about the rewriting task (also known as a hell-of-a-long-job).
I’m a daydreamer (dreaming of being a published author one fine day) and here I’d like to talk about my own art of rewriting.
It’s nice to define it an art. I’ve used the word ‘process’ earlier because in a logical kind of way, rewriting involves certain procedures: you take your text, whether a line at the time, or a paragraph at the time, or a chapter at the time, and you read through it, and make it better. It sounds so simple, such an easy process. Alas, it isn’t.
That’s why I prefer to call it an art, this way we immediately figure it’s not an easy thing. Not that a process, being a set of procedures, means the work is going to be easy, while the word art is synonym for difficult. I don’t mean that. But in my little head a process tells me that if I follow the instructions and do everything as it is explained, I should be able to end up with an almost perfect finished product. Take LEGO for instance, you follow the step by step instructions and you end up with your wonderful Castle set. If you want to make a spaceship with the same LEGO blocks, that requires artistic skills.
Isn’t rewriting the same thing? There’s an endless number of books on editing, rewriting, and redrafting your novel. At the end of the day though, they are but the chisel in your hand, nothing else.
Imagine a sculptor who is smoothening the edges of the statue whose image is in his mind. First he has this huge block of marble or granite – I know nothing about sculpting by the way – then he starts to work on the square block with a chisel, probably a big one to start with and later a smaller one. The smaller the chisel gets, the more refined and detailed is his work. And slowly, very slowly, a Venus or a Pietà appear.
I kind of thought that rewriting would be similar to sculpting: you keep working on it refining smaller details at every round, until the work is smooth and well polished.
Yet, it isn’t so. I guess with a piece of rock, once you’ve chipped out a bit you can’t put it back on again. If you break one of the fingers of Apollo’s hand, you either start afresh on a new piece of rock, or you make a one-handed Apollo.
With a novel, you have a simple idea that normally doesn’t change. Think of the magic one line that pitches your novel, the emotional ‘hook’ that grabs the agent’s attention. For example, here’s a funny (a little long perhaps) hook attributed to Richard Polito for The Wizard of Oz: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.”
You can write a thousand different stories with that idea in mind, one of which could be The Wizard of Oz, and the core plot never changes. Everything else does.
What I’m saying is that with writing we don’t really start afresh if something goes wrong in the middle, we just go back and rewrite. Yes, sometimes changes are so big that it feels like we are starting from scratch, but if we look at the glass half full, rather than half empty, we can think of the rewriting work as redefining our idea.
Recently I’ve discovered my own way of working on a novel. Gosh, after years of writing!
First I write the – guess what? – First Draft, which I call the C.U.T.E. draft or Complete but Ugly and Totally Embarrassing draft. This is the one you keep locked up in your safe and nobody gets to see; ever! I tend to write this in one go, without looking back. No editing, just writing, get the whole idea out on paper and see if it reaches a conclusion. Is there a good premise? Are the characters changing by the end of the story? Is the climax really hot? That’s all I look at in the first draft.
The plot is still very messy, there are plenty of inconsistencies, characters are so shallow that you can see through, and many things just don’t make sense.
Then I go back and start a second draft. I take each chapter and rewrite it, I rearrange scenes, move dialogue around, deepen the atmosphere, try to give more depth to each character, give better definition to their voices, look at the character arc, and then I submit each chapter to my critique groups and get feedback. I keep that feedback under lock and key until I start on the third draft.
Ideally the third draft is the pre-final. You can laugh now. It never is. Incidentally, draft is not equal to rewrite. I could rewrite a chapter a thousand times and still consider it a second-draft chapter, nothing more.
In the third draft I look deeply at the characters. Are they moving the story along? Are they really all important? Or could I cut one down and combine it with another? Is their voice clear and unique? Are they changing in the way I set out in their character arc? If not, what has happened? What do I need to do to make a character believable and felt by the reader? How do I make him or her memorable?
I also look at plot. Normally – in my experience – lots of new ideas about plotting come from the critique groups. They tend to ask a lot of questions (like a reader would if he is not satisfied with what he’s reading), and those questions tend to create what-if scenarios in my head. What if I chance this or that? What if a side character takes up a major role? What if a new element is introduced? What if another twist is added at the end?
These are elements that inextricably change the way the novel is moving forward. If there are sequels to be written, I think about them in the third draft. What elements or clues do I want to leave in this, say, first novel in the series? What do I want to leave unresolved, if anything, without disappointing the reader?
When I reach the third draft stage, or rather in between second and third draft, I also tend to jot down a lot of back story. Wrong term actually. I mean, that part of the story that does not appear in the book at all, but it’s needed to support the main story. It’s like the mythology written as background to a Fantasy novel. Or the historical events and occurrences that happen around the characters in a historical novel, but which are there just as brush strokes in a huge landscape, hardly visible by the eye.
Some may argue that all of that should be done first, before you even start writing your first draft. Research should definitely be done before we start writing. But in order to create the world my characters live in, I need to know them better and I need to know a little about those particular events they live through in the scope of the novel itself. That’s why I prefer to work out the first draft, or even a second draft, before dwelling deeply into their greater world.
Whether art or process, rewriting and drafting your novel requires a great deal of attention and coordination. Like in swimming, every stroke counts in order to reach the finishing line without drowning in the middle.
In The Arkadians (by Lloyd Alexander), Fronto is a poet-turned-donkey who likes to teach us how to become great storytellers. In fact,in his dedication Alexander wrote: For hopeful storytellers and fond listeners.
