Anyone ever rewrite a novel draft?

I restart from word one quite often, as I make changes. It's part of my exploration of the story. It does get annoying sometimes though!

Sort of . . .

When I dreamt of being a Teen Author (tm), I wrote an angsty plotless ramble. The Emotional Inciting Incident was far-fetched and co-opted other people's tragedies.
As soon as I finished it and let my (longsuffering) dad read it, I realized I'd made a mistake. I rewrote the whole da*n thing. It was still angsty, still plotless, but the Emotional Inciting Incident was realistic.

A couple years ago I revived my authorial dreams and decided to see if I could make a plot out of that thing. I did. Still angsty, plenty of plot. It's worlds better. And I adjusted the Emotional Inciting Incident so that more people were alive by the end of it.

Have I finally made a silk purse out of that sow's ear? Or is this idea the dream I really need to let die? Time—and a future reading of these boards—will tell.

I appreciated reading through this thread. I did my first scene rewrite this week, and I think I'm going to do a few more in the early sections of the novel that were written some years ago. I'm not saying I've improved as a writer, but I know my world better so I have less need to write explanations for myself. Just cutting those sections out wasn't working for me during revision. Remodeling took more work than a fresh build, and I kept killing the vibe in scenes through vivisection. I can see why so many people opt to rewrite rather than revise a first draft that isn't working.

shadow2 said:

I'm not usually good at making drafts and editing. But I do see its value.

Is it a stupid idea to rewrite an entire finished novel? Basically there are some major changes to the world I'm writing that I want to make. I don't really see how to do this easily by just editing. But at the same time, rewriting an entire novel is a lot of work (I must have poured hundreds of hours into the draft). Has anyone tried this? Is there a better way to substantively revise a story than rewriting it?

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I did exactly this.

I wrote my first draft back n '14/15. Edited it, sent it out to be read and stuck it on the back shelf to be "looked at later" while I got on with life (had a baby, moved house) and started a second book. I came back to the draft in...hmm, was it '17 or '18? A good time later. And I realised that the way the story was, it was never going to work. The MC didn't appeal to me, let alone readers. She was a right drip and I couldn't understand why the male protag would leave his dandy life for her. There were other holes too; why was male protag's girlfriend so perfect, why did his sister have a storyline at all, etc etc.

And so I ripped the whole thing apart. I kept the basic outlines of the characters but tweaked their personalities to make them more...realistic, so to speak. The MC, for one, needed a lot of work and I changed the relationship between her and male protag because the original 'dumping our partners for one another' line was so not them. And then I started from the beginning, going through the whole manuscript and keeping what I thought I could work with and dumping what didn't work. It didn't take as long as I thought it would. About a summer, I think, and that's as a parent of a toddler. A person without a child trying to get at their laptop to watch Moana could probably work faster.

My advice, I suppose, is; is it worth it? Do you feel the story has potential? If so, go for it. Rewrite the lot. It'll undoubtedly be better than what you started with - being a rewrite will be an improvement - and you'll be happier with it. If not, chalk it up as an experience story and move on to a new one.

Good luck

I'm one of those sick sad folks who adores the rewrite/revise phases. Don't get me wrong, a halfway decent first draft is always a miracle in my house, but it's in the rewrites where I really get to play, chase plot twists, and discover new things about my characters and settings.

I take it to extremes, however, since I'm primarily a hobby writer these days. The 100K book in my sig started life as a 6K short story. It got so big because editors and beta readers kept pushing me to explain or elaborate. Whole chapters and subplots grew out of single lines and paragraphs.

Then again, I'm a weirdo.

I'm a little bit at this point myself and I am 60,000 words in. I feel like I have written myself into a corner and some of the plot is in a tangle. I'm pretty happy with the first third of the book but I am going to have to be brave and take the plot back quite a bit, I think. Thinking and deliberating about having to do a rewrite is worst than actually getting on with it. If you don't like the rewrite either, you can always take another look at the first draft with fresh eyes...sometimes you get an 'a-ah' moment when you least expect it (or as a tutor of mine once called it a 'karmic dog biscuit').

Good luck.

shadow2 said:

I know what you mean about being tied to the words of the first draft. Like, it's killing me when I had I good joke written into the first draft that I just want to put back into the rewrite, but there's no context for it anymore . Same thing with the pretty metaphors I had the first time around. What a waste.

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Ha! This is so me. I get so amused with the jokes I have, that they're so hard to give up, even when I cut the entire scene!

I'm currently working on my first novel. I had a plan going into my first draft: a plot, character descriptions, conflict diagram. Then in the process of writing my first draft, I decided I needed to cut a couple characters, add a few new ones, change the age of my MC, and turn the side plot into the main conflict. My second draft was a 70% re-write from my first draft. And then after the second draft, I realized I could increase my conflict if I made a few additional changes and now my third draft is a 30% re-write from my second (still working on it). So it feels like a complete re-write now.

For me, this is just the way I have to do it. It's in the process of writing that I find what it is that I really want to say.

Last summer I wrote a manuscript. Got to the end, realized I loved the characters, loved the C-plot, and hated everything else.

Restarted from scratch in November. Had the draft done by New Year's Eve. Agented by mid-February.

It turned out that writing that first draft let me get out all the gooey, emotional-quagmire stuff I wanted to do with those characters, and it allowed me to cut down to the actual meat-and-potatoes parts of the story. It was great. I mean, I don't think I'm going to make a habit of writing two versions of every book I write from now on, but in this case, it turned out to be exactly what I needed to do.

I just got home after 4 years of incarceration. While there, I wrote 22 full length manuscripts and 26 short stories. Now I've only begun to transfer them from ink and paper to Word. On the first one, I've rewritten at least parts of every chapter, tossed some completely and added to others. So, yes, I can see where a rewrite can be useful. Of course, having the time to read over 600 novels from some of the best changed my perspectives a lot.

I started to revise a novel a couple years ago, but realized I needed to do a scrap and redo. The basic plot arc stayed the same, but I tossed the entire middle section, plus added a number of characters and complications. It's coming out this September from Rebel Base Books.

I don't normally rewrite books. Edit them severely, sure.

Until I finished a book and realized...the story wasn't working in first person. It just...didn't work.

There's too much to try to go in and change from first to third. A rewrite is necessary.

So now I'm going back through and rewriting it into third.

i thought i'd leave my first novel dead in the water, and was considering starting afresh, but now i'm inclined to believe i can rewrite it.

i'll read through it first, it's been some years since i have, then perhaps i can work in some new ideas and more character flaws, because nobody's perfect.

Full disclosure: I read through the responses and smiled--I'm normal. I thought I was such an amateur for the repeated massive rewrites of all my writing I'm serious about, ever. I often become frustrated and set projects aside. And yet, editing is a lot of fun for me. It was a proud moment when a former editor sent me home with thirteen pages of edits for my first play. Now, I edit on my own and am eager to find a new editor. Point I'm trying to make I guess: my edits -do- amount to massive rewrites. I don't think there's anything wrong with rewrites or massive revisions. I think they're good. Time-consuming, yes, and it often breeds doubt in my own writing abilities for myself, but--I think they are good.
I hope this helps!

I did five page one rewrites of my first published novel over about 20 years - querying agents and publishers after each one - before I finally sold the book. Ironically, the only major difference in the fifth draft (apart from the improvement of my writing skills) was the addition of a prologue featuring a bored teenager.

I have not done the same with my other novels, but I was obsessed with the first one and felt certain it would be published one day.

I am astonished that this is even a question. How can you not rewrite anything you've written, be it a novel, short story, or essay? Makes me think that I should go back to teaching Composition and Rhetoric. Geesh.

babbage said:

I am astonished that this is even a question. How can you not rewrite anything you've written, be it a novel, short story, or essay? Makes me think that I should go back to teaching Composition and Rhetoric. Geesh.

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I don't think I've ever rewritten non-fiction. Edited it, yes, but not rewritten it.

A smart friend told me a good way to do it is to print out the entire thing, and by forcing yourself to retype things, you see all the things you should change and make your story much better. I haven't had the courage to do that yet--printing off 200+ pages is a huge commitment of paper and money--but it sounds like a really good idea to me.

WrenWrites said:

A smart friend told me a good way to do it is to print out the entire thing, and by forcing yourself to retype things, you see all the things you should change and make your story much better. I haven't had the courage to do that yet--printing off 200+ pages is a huge commitment of paper and money--but it sounds like a really good idea to me.

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Another good way is to read it aloud and record the reading. Mistakes will often cause you to stumble and hearing it will tell you a lot about what you have written. We "hear" as we write but not in the same way it comes out on the other end.

Use a typewriter for your first drafts. Then you have no choice but to rewrite as you put the thing into a word processor.

WrenWrites said:

A smart friend told me a good way to do it is to print out the entire thing, and by forcing yourself to retype things, you see all the things you should change and make your story much better. I haven't had the courage to do that yet--printing off 200+ pages is a huge commitment of paper and money--but it sounds like a really good idea to me.

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Excellent advice. I've been doing this for as long as I can remember, and it helps tremendously in the final stages of editing.

PorterStarrByrd said:

Another good way is to read it aloud and record the reading. Mistakes will often cause you to stumble and hearing it will tell you a lot about what you have written. We "hear" as we write but not in the same way it comes out on the other end.

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Yup, I've done that, and I would suppose that a total rewrite could be necessary for all but the most experienced or talented writers. I am in awe of Dickens who published some novels serially, giving him no opportunity to change anything in previous chapters--no way to plant seeds or insert foreshadowing, no way to alter anything about a plot or a character. I did my rewriting because I had to (or wanted to) shorten what I had written by about 25%, but I took a whole new look at everything as I did that, essentially writing a new novel.

For what it's worth, a writing coach I once took a course from has as his standard procedure that he rewrites the whole darn thing without cutting and pasting, on the theory that you don't know what your novel is really about until you've written it. The "final" draft then is just an exercise to get you ready for the big rewrite.

I do this. Papers not expensive and with the printer set to draft it doesn’t use as much ink as you’d think. Current work is 380+ pages. It’s definitely worth the money. Seeing it on paper is really satisfying too

I have redrafted my first eBook a few times and there is no question about its vast benefits. Your draft keeps improving.

I've only done a full rewrite once, with one of my current WIPs, after several years of approaching it in a way that wasn't quite natural for me. It wasn't that anything was objectively wrong with it—it was probably good enough to be publishable—but it felt wrong. My intuition screamed at me and I listened, and I'm glad I did. The version I'm writing now feels much better and is overall of better quality. Certainly took time (and is still taking time), but it reminded me what my process is and should be, and what happens when I don't listen to my writerly intuition, so the time wasn't wasted.

Drafting is the key to writing well. Nobody writes perfectly on the first time.