1. I haven’t written any new words or edited any old ones in my novel for a couple of weeks. The kids are on school holidays, except for my Year 12 daughter who is sitting her mock exams. There have been concerts, camps, birthdays, and I haven’t been able to carve out the time or mental space for writing.
2. Having said that, I’m on the downhill run with this rewrite. I’ve shredded scenes, turned them upside-down and inside-out, ‘murdered’ my darlings, and replaced them with newer, sleeker versions. What has struck me during this process is how quickly the memory of my darlings fades, and I realise they weren’t really the jewels I thought they were.
3. Either that, or ‘out of sight, out of mind’.
4. Sometimes, I worry that no one will want to publish my story when it’s finished, and all this time and effort is in vain …
5. But I couldn’t stop now even if I wanted to.
6. Besides, I know it won’t be a waste even if Ida’s Children is never published. The value 0f this novel may be in the learning, so I can put all my acquired knowledge into my second novel, the publishable one.
7. Sometimes, I wonder if I should have just started my second novel instead of rewriting this one. Then again, I couldn’t have abandoned it—I don’t give up easily, not until I’ve seen a project through to the end, and whatever I do, I can’t do it half-heartedly.
8. I’ve also learnt so much by rewriting it, much more than if I’d abandoned it and started afresh.
9. I recently read an article in The Victorian Writer‘s June edition (I’m always a few months behind in my journal reading). It was titled, Re-Write Right, and written by novelist Kate Belle. It starts with the quote:
‘There is no great writing, only great rewriting.’ (Justice Brandeis)
Kate goes on to say:
‘I thought the act of rewriting was like tidying the house. You pick a few things up and shove them under the bed, you blow the dust off the top of books and push cupboards closed on bunched up clothes and tangles of shoes.’
She soon learnt that’s not rewriting. Rewriting is:
‘… starting again with fresh eyes, chopping out whole chapters, writing new ones, experimenting with point of view and tense and plot lines, dumping scenes …’
‘A true rewrite isn’t a desultory tidy up. It takes real courage. And honesty.’
‘Rewriting should be an exercise in ego suppression, of disengaging the parts the self intimately connected to those words you’ve sweated and bled and exalted over. It’s an act of stepping as far back as you can from what you’ve created and appraising those words with a ruthless and critical eye. Actively looking for flaws and picking out the gold from the forest of words can be painful. There is grief. There’s often disappointment, sometimes even despair. There is the cutting of the creative umbilical cord over and over again, until all the excess self-indulgence has been pared away and only the essential bones of the story are left.’
‘Rewriting is the true work of writing, driven by a deeper understanding of what the story is trying to say.’
10. This article affirmed everything I’ve been trying to accomplish with this rewrite, and I really feel as if I’m doing the right thing. In fact, I’m even glad it was passed over for the Hungerford Award, because if it hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have discovered this better story.
11. My novel has undergone such major surgery—a gastrectomy, enterectomy, and colectomy. In other words, I’ve ripped its guts out, and given it a brand new one!
The story that remains has been there all along, latent and waiting to be discovered, but to find it, I had to go searching, unravelling it, then knitting it all back together again.
12. If you’d like a more refined metaphor: editing this story has reminded me of how my kids learn a new piece of music—they quickly learn all the notes and it sounds okay, not great, but okay. They then spend weeks, even months, polishing it. It’s tedious work, and they don’t particularly like it, playing the same piece over and over, plucking out a bar or two and practising it again and again. It would be much more enjoyable to move on to something new and fresh, but it’s those weeks and months of monotonous, grinding labour that make the music come alive. Not only does their technique improve and everything becomes more accurate, but alongside that, something intangible happens—the piece becomes a part of them, and they seem to understand it, feel its nuances, realise what the composer meant. As a listener, you hear it change from ‘meh’ to magical.
I think writing’s similar—the first draft is just the story, and it’s the editing that makes it special. That laborious, unglamorous, confusing, and mentally exhausting time, during which you discover the real meaning of a particular scene, see motivations in a character you hadn’t previously spotted, and come to understand what your story is really trying to say.
~
This week, I tried taking photos of ‘red’.
Our first red rose of spring:
Stop sign at the end of our street. I was looking into the sunset and had to overexpose the background. The camera’s also on the ‘Selective Colour’ setting.
More ‘selective colour’:
We’ve been gardening, tidying up after our destructive dogs, but it’s rather like painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge—as soon as you finish, you have to go back and start again.
Meanwhile, down at the Lake it’s family time:
It feels like summer when we start juicing fruits and eating outside:
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I am coming to the re-write stage and hope to do it right! Your description of the process is very insightful as are Kate Belle’s quotes. Perseverance is the key. Push aside the doubts….and good luck with it!
Thanks, Rowena. This re-write has been exhausting—I’m. So. So. Sick. Of. My. Novel! Reading Kate Belle’s article was helpful and motivating. I’m hoping perseverance will pay off, and I’m pushing aside the doubts, as you say, and ploughing on with the job at hand, in the hope it will one day come to something …
Good luck with your rewrite! Please let me know how you get on.
Loving your journey, your words and your photos. Can’t wait for Ida either xxxx
Thanks, Rae! I can’t wait to finish!
excellent piece, Louise, thank you!
Thanks, Karen. I’m not sure that it is so excellent—my brain feels too tired to be creative at the moment!
I like your analogy about learning to play a piece of music. I think it applies to everything you want to perfect. It’s necessary to work on it again and again and eventually make it an extension of yourself. Pity I lack that commitment.
You’re right—the approach to music a good metaphor for approaching anything you want to do well. I actually did it studying Medicine, too, until I could do a clinical examination blind-folded! Well, not quite …
I don’t believe you do lack commitment to perfecting something, Michelle—you’ve persisted with your blog for so long and so, so regularly, and that is a huge commitment! You just have to find what you want to commit to …
The advice re re-writing is gold. Thanks for sharing. I like also your humility in admitting that being passed over for an award has led you to fresh insight.
It was a fantastic article—I’ll email it to you. Perhaps it’s humility about the Hungerford, but it’s also being honest. As much as you hope your book is the best, I can see how faulty it was, and I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to make it better. The thing is, it’s probably still full of flaws … It’s never-ending!
I so understand what you’re saying about the endless rewrites – you do get heartily sick of your own story, don’t you? And I think the excerpt you’ve quoted sums up the process perfectly. I know I’m learning more about my characters with each book I do, and it is worth spending the time going back into their world and removing the things that don’t work. That being said, the process is a real pain in the arse, isn’t it? Hope it’s all going well xx
The article was terrific. This rewrite of my novel has been huge, and people who’ve read both versions say it’s almost as if I’ve written two different books, albeit the second one is a lot better. At times, I’ve wondered if I really am doing the right thing, or if I should have continued trying publish my novel as it was and moved on to writing the second novel. So it was affirming to read how another author accepted feedback and committed to a massive rewrite. My instinct is that I’m doing the right thing by rewriting it …
If it’s your instinct, then it’s definitely the right thing – though it’s nice you’ve had all that feedback too. I’ve had similar comments with No Quarter – one of my beta readers of the original just finished the published version and commented that it felt like reading a new book. I rewrote so much of it, and it was an awful hassle, but it was worth it. I’m so pleased that this is happening for you too, I can’t wait to read it 🙂
Rewriting is such a hassle—it’s a shame readers don’t just love our work as it is when we think we’re done, and save us a heap of work! But I’m sure it will be worth it when I get to the end. I sat at my computer today and for the first time in a couple of weeks, ideas and words came. It felt good to be back at the coalface—I’d missed it. I felt similarly to one of your commenters—I was worried all my words had dried up forever!
Oh, I’m pleased to hear you’re back at it 🙂 Yes, it’s amazing how those initial words you think are so fabulous turn out to be, when you go back to them after a month or two, not so fabulous any more. Writing is definitely not for the faint-hearted!