The woes of Re Writing

I will refrain from expletives during this post as I know and feel the pin you guys are going through when you realise you have to rewrite, whether its a paragraph, chapter of the whole thing. It hurts mentally and emotionally. After all, that time spent writing, thinking its possible gods gift to the world and you get told by someone, or you realise that actually there are too many issues with it, you just have to step back and fight it at a different angle.

Trust me, I know. I'll let you into a little secret, Phaser, which you can find on Amazon right now started out as a NaNoWriMo project in 2012 was made into something quite marvellous. I wrote the whole thing in the month, then edited it through thought it was incredible, but then I went to university and dabbled in my own writing on an off knowing it would be published when I graduated. But in those four years, I rewrote the whole novel three times. I tried different characters, I tried different plots until I found that one thing that fit. Once you find that one thing, it might be a plot twist you have needed or a character that just pulls everything together. Or a scene that ties together two ideas you've wanted.

It might seem like a pain in the backside but trust me, if you know something needs a rewrite it's for a reason. Trust your instinct, you know what is important to the plot, to the character and to yourself. If you find yourself just repeatedly getting into plot holes and character issues, then consider this, would it take longer to iron out those problems in editing than doing a rewrite of a few scenes? Yeah, I hear you all crying and shouting out about editing time. But think about it, if you don't have any plot holes and issues, then isn't editing a slight breeze? Isn't it better to only have focus on the technical editing, rather than the plot and structure as well as all the other stuff?

Sometimes rewriting might set you back a month or so, but you might make that up when you are editing afterward. If you get to a point and you honestly dot know what to do, way up the options of a rewrite, even if it's just the chapter. Just in a separate word document try out a different path for your plotline and see how it work. This is how I find the best path for my novel.

#Editing #Writing #Plan