2/2/2024
The Scourge of Rewriting
This is number ninety-seven in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“WRITE YOUR FIRST DRAFT with your heart. Rewrite with your head.”—Finding Forrester, 2000 film starring Rob Brown and Sean Connery.
Oh. Red Grange once said, “Writing is easy. You just sit at a typewriter and open a vein.” That is writing with your heart. And, in much of the best work, it is what makes it flow and pulse with emotion. It is what I do when I sit down to write a new story draft in thirty or forty-five days. I bleed all over the page.
And then, I have this unholy mess to clean up!
Rewriting with my head is really difficult.
When I sat down to write Nathan Everett’s American Royalty in 2019, I had a pretty clear idea of what the storyline would be. I even posted the first draft for comments on SOL. It would be the story of a parallel universe America with a highly defined set of classes based on ability and inclination rather than heredity and wealth. And I just let it flow.
I set it aside and waited for editorial comments before launching the rewrite in July of 2020 under the new name A Place at the Table. What a mess to clean up!
First of all, I had developed the relationship between Meredith and Liam far too quickly. She came off appearing to have been a prostitute brought in to teach Liam about sex. That wasn’t the idea I intended at all! So, I had to scrub the manuscript of relationship issues and let Liam discover other stuff on his own. Meredith had to be his dependable assistant and advisor. It couldn’t be colored, at least at that stage, by anything other than the sexual tension that would continue to be between them.
Secondly, all my class names needed to be reworked because they were too reminiscent of traditional classes (like ‘royalty’) that carried a pre-conceived notion or stigma with the use of the word. And the supporting characters needed to be fully developed and not look so two-dimensional.
Enough to say that I had three months of sweating bullets to get the manuscript ready for the next round of editing. Ultimately, the book was published in December of 2020 and it was reasonably successful.
The story didn’t end there. I started writing the sequel, A Place Among Peers, in November of 2023. I realized after the outpouring of November that it was just off the rails. I was probably three-quarters of the way through the first draft when I put it aside. I finally figured out, near the end of 2024, where the story had gone bad. It was in chapter one. Having figured out the problem, however, I have a massive amount of work to do to rewrite the story and make it a suitable sequel to A Place at the Table. That rewrite will finally begin in a couple of months.
A Place at the Table is available as an eBook at Bookapy, and in paperback at online resellers.
Ah, yes. I promised this week I would talk about the rewrite of my current WIP, Forever Yours. The first draft under the working title of “Sisyphus: A Modern Myth,” was 45 chapters and 153,000 words in length. My story editor, Lyndsy, made copious notes all through the manuscript and we carried on several conversations regarding what was wrong with the book. Many of them started with my main character being an asshole.
I had to agree, but I’d bled all over the pages.
I studied Lyndsy’s notes and our conversations and realized where the source of the mess was that I needed to clean up. It was in the main character, Henry. I’d tried to model him after the Greek Hero Sisyphus and to replicate some of the tales from the myth. Unfortunately, Sisyphus was an asshole. There was a reason he was sent to Tartarus and forced to unendingly push a boulder up a mountain. Each time he reached the top, the boulder broke loose and rolled back to the bottom. Sisyphus had to start again and push the boulder up the mountain.
I won’t go into any more of the Sisyphus myth, but what Lyndsy helped me to discover was the parallel wasn’t the nugget of the story I wanted to tell. The real story was Henry’s development of, and relationship to, artificial intelligence and the ethics of using it. Those items were buried in the first draft, but were mostly hidden in the stories that paralleled the myth.
Traditional advice on rewriting a manuscript, I believe, doesn’t account for the complete change in focus of the story. You might find the following advice on any writing site or class.
1. Take time away.
2. Break your work and put it back together.
3. Pretend to be someone else.
4. Get feedback from an editor or writing partner.
5. Spend a limited amount of time working on problem areas.
6. Look for passages that need rephrasing.
7. Try color coding.
8. Ask lots of questions.
9. Read your manuscript aloud.
10. Print and read a hard copy.
From “How to Master the Rewriting Process” at https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-master-the-rewriting-process.
These are all really good steps that any manuscript should go through some form of. But they barely scratch the surface of what my rewriting process is.
My process starts with a blank sheet of paper (or Word document) and an outline of the high points of my new story. I find that the biggest problem most authors have is starting from the previous draft and trying to correct it. This assumes the basic structure and story are solid. Mine aren’t!
By starting with a blank document and literally typing in every new word I want in the new story, I have shed the skin of the first draft. I will read what I had before and write what I want now. Typically, the wording will be clearer, the draft will be shorter, and massive sections will be cut because they are suddenly irrelevant.
That includes my wonderful scenes of the goddess Aphrodite coming to Henry in the night to teach him about love and about the condition of the ancient gods. As Lyndsy told me in her notes: “I can see what you mean about removing the Goddess storyline. It may just be cluttering things up.”
I’ve removed it.
This rewriting with my head is hard work. It requires not getting caught up in side-trips I took in the original manuscript. It won’t be as fast a process as writing the first draft. I actually have to think about things pretty thoroughly.
Here’s hoping!
Of course, my Sausage Grinder patrons get weekly updates on the manuscript process, reading along and commenting as I write it.
Since I’m so heavily focused at the moment on the rewrite of Forever Yours, and just finished the rewrite and publication of Soulmates, I’ll continue with this topic next week, this time focusing on “Cutting Your Favorite Scene.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
