Editing sucks. I’m in the middle of it right now, and I can tell you, 80,000 words looked a whole lot smaller before it was already on the page. And how do you even know what needs to change? It’s your baby – you think it’s perfect. And on top of everything, editing is boring. You might feel like you’ve already passed the fun part of writing a novel, and now all that’s left is drudgery.
And you’re right – it is drudgery. Let me introduce you to the editing method that’s not: rewriting from scratch.
Most pros agree you shouldn’t be trying to line edit your own novel. You need a professional editor for that (yes, even if you’re self-publishing). Instead, what a lot of people (myself included) do is rewrite the entire draft from scratch. Personally, I use a split screen or a second monitor to see the old draft next to the new, and retype it line by line until I find something I want to change. (If you write with Scrivener, there’s a split screen feature right in the program that’s great for this!) Some people prefer to set their old draft aside and simply work from a set of notes or a revised outline during the rewrite. Whatever floats your boat. The point is to treat the new draft like its own being, rather than simply the old draft with a fresh coat of paint.
People are often skeptical of this process when they first hear about it, which is understandable. It sounds almost more overwhelming than the editing process it’s designed to replace. I just got done typing the damn thing, and now you’re telling me I have to do it all over again?! But before you throw up your hands and turn off your computer in disgust, let me take you on a quick tour of the rewrite-don’t-edit method, and maybe change your mind.
Rewriting is slow
If you’re thinking retyping everything sounds just as tedious as rereading and editing, you’re right! And that’s a good thing!
When you edit by sifting through the material that’s already there, your brain is going to play tricks on you. You think you know what’s written there and how it’s going to feel to read, so your brain glosses over it quickly, replacing what’s really on the page with these fantasies. It’s not until you’re forced to encounter your manuscript on a word-by-word basis that you truly see the reality of your many mistakes, and retyping it all from scratch does just that.
Rewriting slows down your eyeballs and your brain, allowing you to catch mistakes I guarantee you never would have spotted otherwise, big and small. The dialogue you took for granted when you just read over it is suddenly going to sound clunky and unrealistic. That plot twist you get so excited about every time you reread it actually doesn’t make sense at all. Seven hundred comma errors will leap off the page at you, and you’ll realize you typed “the” as “teh” so many times your draft looks like an LOLcats meme from 2005. This will not feel good, but fixing it will.
Rewriting changes your focus
There are four main types of editing, all of which I guarantee your first draft is in dire need of:
- The developmental edit, which is concerned with the plot, ideas, and themes of the story as a whole
- The structural edit, which deals with story structure and organization
- The line edit, which addresses wording, clarity, and flow at the sentence or paragraph level
- The copy edit, which fixes grammar and spelling mistakes
When we think of editing in the traditional sense, we’re usually thinking of line or copyediting, but that’s not what your manuscript needs at this stage (although you will end up doing some of it, because you’ll see problems and they’ll drive you nuts – see above, re: LOLcats). When we talk about editing a draft that’s never seen the light of day before, what we should be talking about are the developmental and structural edits.
Does your story make sense? Is the protagonist likeable? Is the humor actually funny, or the horror actually horrifying? Is it thematically consistent? Does the dialogue feel real? Did you foreshadow everything that needs foreshadowing? Rewriting rather than editing makes answering these questions a whole lot easier to answer, since it makes it much easier to envision your story from the perspective of someone who’s never encountered it before. Leave those edits up to someone who really has never encountered it before, and you’re in for some very uncomfortable – and avoidable – feedback.
You have to rewrite the whole thing
“But obviously I was planning to edit the whole thing, so it’s the same—”
NO. Stop it! You weren’t! Let me explain.
When we approach editing, no matter our method, we almost always have a few problems in mind we’d like to solve. Maybe we already know where there was a plot hole, or recall a passage harboring some clunky prose we’re desperate to reword. That’s good! You should absolutely address those issues.
When you get to them.
With editing, we’re more free to flit around and spot-check specific scenes. This often feels like the easiest thing to do, so we do it. Rewriting, on the other hand, forces you to address every single scene whether you believe it needs help or not. And trust me, it does. We all have our biases, especially when it comes to our own work, and nothing shatters them quite so effectively as redoing the whole thing from scratch. This can be disheartening at first, as spotting your own mistakes always is, but I promise you’ll be glad you did.
You GET TO rewrite the whole thing
When we edit something, there’s a natural tendency to see the story as set in stone – an unchangeable monolith we’re just chipping away at, rather than something fluid and easily modified. This is fine for the little chips, but what if you need to demolish an entire hillside? What if you encounter an entire plot thread that needs restructuring, or a redundant character who’s in fifty-odd scenes and needs to be cut from the manuscript entirely? You will have these problems, no matter how flawless you think your baby is. And spotting them during a high-level edit is one of the most intimidating experiences you’ll ever have outside of, say, a bullfighting arena.
But cutting out a character or changing the pacing of a subplot is nothing short of a breeze when you’re already rewriting the whole thing from scratch. And even better, you’re not going to miss any references to that deleted character, or forget to move that one scene, if you’re using a process that forces you to go through each and every scene in the book with the exact same level of detail. Rewriting gives you the flexibility and freedom to make big changes to your manuscript as painlessly as you would fix a comma splice. (Well, almost.)
Reliving the glory days
Like I said, people tend to see editing as the icky part of the writing process, and the first draft as the fun part. We all love the feeling of putting a story down on paper for the first time. No matter how many years and how many manuscripts you have under your belt, the first draft can take you right back to feeling you got from the first stories you ever wrote: that catharsis of discovery and creation that got you into this game in the first place. Editing… does not give you that feeling, does it?
But rewriting might! I’ve actually come to enjoy the rewriting process more. It’s all the pure, creative joy of the first draft with the added pleasure of knowing that whatever I’m making right now is better than what came before it. It’s taking a story that I love and making myself love it even more – creation and improvement all wrapped up into one. I promise you’ll be glad you did it, and your manuscript will too.
Happy (re)writing!