Rewrites

Ah, yes. You see our topic for this week correctly. We’re going to talk about the dreaded rewrite.

*Insert thunder and lightning*

I feel like the general advice toward rewriting is always that rewrites are a crucial part of the writing process and that you should never get too attached to any scene, character, or element that might eventually have to hit the chopping block. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

Yes, rewrites are essential- Kristin and I actually did two major rewrites of our manuscript The Visionary, which I’m going to explain as an example for this week’s blog. And yes, rewriting does require you to be willing to lose stuff, even if you have to cut things you love, but you’ve got train yourself to focus less on “Oh, I love this scene and really want to keep it” and work on saying, “Yes, I love this scene, but does it really work toward the greater story?” The benefits of keeping the scene must contribute to furthering the story, rather than just being a good scene.

So, let’s talk from experience. As I briefly went into in our very first Write Off the Rails blog (Click here for the origin story), it took Kristin and me a very long time to figure out how to find a way to work together effectively on writing Visionary. We’re talking years, people. We both wanted to write together, we tried to write off and on for a very long time, and nothing in the story really went anywhere…at least anywhere that made sense. There was little planning, coordination, time, and separation that did not help us trying to write. It was a time of darkness and everyone was sad. :(

I’m being dramatic, but essentially it took us a good five years to finally realize our schedules were aligned in a way that allowed us to work. Enter Major Rewrite 1.

Because we’d written off and on for years, we actually had quite a bit of story down - though of course, it had a few obvious problems: we both hated how it was written, it made very little sense because it had been written randomly for so long, and there really was no plot.

As I addressed before, we realized we had a pretty good chapter one, but nowhere for it to go. We realized that our inciting incident was really setting up the plot for the intended trilogy as a whole and was not actually laying out a place for Book 1 to go. In this case, where we both really weren’t too happy with the old one, it was easy to say, “Okay, we’ve got to scrap everything but chapter one.” 5+ years of work deleted forever with one keystroke. Not really fun to think about, but we both realized that the story the way it was did not work and we both knew that we could do better.

So, before we actually started writing, we had to figure out how to bring an immediate plot for Book 1 into being. Even rewriting the story better wouldn’t fix it if there was no story. So, we came up with a mystery for our characters to solve. Keep the larger inciting incident for the trilogy but work in a more immediate problem to keep our characters busy.

In the same way we had to talk about the plot (or lack thereof), we also took the time to see what we needed to revise elsewhere. Though we ended up keeping a lot of chapter one, it did get a complete rewrite anyway, just to better the writing technique and change what we felt needed to be fixed. Secondly- and here’s where the attachment part comes in more- we ended up talking back through our characters to see if they needed any changes. Concerning Book 1, I think pretty much all the major characters we had previously planned to have within the story make an appearance within the first two or three chapters. Most of them did not change too much during this initial rewrite. The character that probably changed the most during this stage was Dylan, one of our main trio, who initially was a bit more of a confident, jock type of guy, but we decided here we wanted to make him a little more nerdy and bumbling, though we did keep him an athlete. This made Dylan fit in a little bit better with Jade and Henry, and made him a little less stereotypical.

With some of the new changes worked out and a shiny new plot to drive the story, we began working on our first draft of Visionary and actually got the story written fairly quick. We then took a week to read back over the story and, with the intention of leaving it alone for a month to come back to it with fresh eyes, discussed ideas we’d like to include or things to change once we started working again.

Enter Major Rewrite 2.

As you can probably guess, we had not actually intended to come back and do a major rewrite of Visionary. We’d initially intended to polish up anything we thought needed work and go from there. But- I kid you not, this is how it happened (because of course it was)- that on our very last day of reading and discussing Visionary before putting it away, Kristin and I found a way to make an idea fit that we had always wanted to include but could never really make work before.

An idea that made the story twenty times cooler.

An idea that also required extreme major changes to plot, several characters backstories, relationships, and even character appearance.

Essentially, we needed to rewrite the same story, but the vast majority of the context between things was vastly different. It was a massive change, which required a lot of discussion and planning, but it was way worth it. The relationships between the characters got even stronger, there was much more diversity among our characters, the plot just worked better- the change completely leveled up the book in a way that gave us a story we were much prouder of.

Because of this change, we did have to rethink the context for most scenes, as well as make several very important character changes. Our main character, Jade, and her family gained a much more complex relationship in this stage. Jade and Henry, the other two characters in our main trio beyond Dylan, became less of an awkward friends scenario and suddenly had way more opportunities to be used together in a richer way. Our bad guys got a much more sinister backstory. Ironically though, Dylan was one of the few characters who didn’t change too much during this rewrite. Guess we got him worked out pretty well in Rewrite 1.

Another thing we had to do in this second rewrite was we actually ended up adding at least two chapters to the story. One because we needed another middle, training type scene to prepare for something to come later, which coincidentally gave us the opportunity to use a character that had been in and out of the story prior to that. That actually ended up working really well because it laid the groundwork for Jade, who is notoriously not so great at making friends, to clearly begin finding her way with characters beyond Dylan and Henry. Yes, those three are the main friend group, but we especially wanted Jade to slowly branch out socially because trusting others is something she really struggles with in Book 1. Plus, for later books, we wanted it clear the three of them all play roles within other social groups as well.

The second chapter we added was more by necessity because we had to separate out two scenes that had previously been written into one chapter. It just worked a bit better if we combined things a different way, so we took the original chapter that was divided into two separate, unrelated scenes and split it. The first half of the chapter, one of the first real heart-to-hearts between Jade and Dylan, got filled out a bit more and became its own separate chapter. The other half scene then became the first section of the next chapter, which made more sense order-wise since it’s the beginning of the event that carries over for the next few chapters. This is a big scene, so it worked better to have it to itself. I think what happened next was we took a portion of the following chapter and added it to the scene we moved- it was too little on its own to be a chapter. We then added to the following chapter, which was now shorter, but that was easy because this is kind of a “Where Everything Goes Wrong” scene.

Essentially, by the end of Rewrite 2, we had added/merged at least four scenes into this block, which is a little over halfway into the book. This really helped this section too because it was the part Kristin and I had the most trouble writing in our original draft, so it felt like it made much more sense and had gotten filled out better once we’d rearranged and added to it.

These two rewrites were really the only major rewrites we did. Technically, The Visionary has always been a rewrite since we rewrote it as it exists now almost completely from scratch, then rewrote it again. Hey, if that’s what it took to make it better though, then it’s worth it. Kristin and I are way happier with it now than we ever were and now we actually feel like we have a book we can be proud of.

Though we only did two massive rewrites, remember that we were always constantly on the lookout for grammar or continuity errors or little things that needed to be fixed for the entirety of the writing process. There were times when we purposefully did a fair amount of fixing/rewriting, specifically when we got a printed-out version of Visionary and went through it by hand. Plus, we’re expecting a professional edit of the book back very soon, so I am pretty confident that we’re not even remotely done cleaning it up.

I think knowing when to rewrite means going with your gut. Kristin and I gutted (pun intended) Visionary twice because we knew that’s what it needed to make it better. That may not always be the case. As we’ve worked on the sequel to Visionary, we’ve both felt fairly sure that it really won’t need a total overhaul in the way the first book did- we’re a bit more confident in our writing, the story feels more fleshed out, and most elements seem to be working. Maybe that’s some of the difference between first and second books though. Book 1, we really didn’t have a lot of idea where all it would go once we started writing it, but with Book 2, we had a much more direct plan of what needed to happen.

Writing is hard. But please don’t write and rewrite your ideas over and over until you’re sick of them. (Done that one before. Would not recommend.) Go with your gut. See if there’s a way to make your ideas work. As I said, Kristin and I didn’t find a way to incorporate an idea we’d wanted in Visionary from the beginning until we were completely finished with the first draft. Rewrites can be slow-going and painful, but if they’re worth it, then they can pay off in a big way.

Anyway, that’s just what we did. Tell us your rewrite stories or any tips you have!

Thanks for reading. Write on.

-Kamryn