Learning to Rewrite

by Jemi Fraser

For me learning to rewrite a draft was NOT an easy road.

Stage #1 - Complete Ignorance

• in my first rewrite, I had no idea what I was doing. I went through the draft, fixed all the typos, tweaked some sentences, and was daring enough to eliminate a couple of paragraphs here and there
• then I met some amazing folks over at Agent Query Connect and learned that a rewrite should be a slightly more intense process

Stage #2 - Gaining Confidence

• the next step in my journey was realizing that everything I'd written in my first drafts didn't have to be included in the final draft. I could take out entire scenes. I could move entire scenes. Change pov.
• these realizations actually shocked me, and took me a while to wrap my head around 
• at this point, I carefully saved each new 'draft' with a date indicating the changes

Stage #3 - Gaining Crit Buddies

• this changed my world and burst my naive little bubble. And I will be forever grateful.
• I learned that a rewrite involved more than the tweaking I'd been doing.
• reaching deep down into the story was pretty tough. I was faced with some big realizations. Probably the biggest one was that external conflict isn't enough. There needed to be internal conflict too. For both my MCs (I write romance).
• this involved re-reading and re-writing scene by scene, making changes, keeping track of changes, making notes, deleting favourite scenes & lines, adding conflict (lots and lots of adding conflict)
• I no longer saved drafts, only the main one, with a folder (I'd discovered Scrivener at this point) with the very few scenes I though I might want to reuse or rescue somehow

Stage #4 - A Real Rewrite

• I tried my Stage 3 version of rewriting for several of my novels, and found it very discouraging. Several stories I know have tons of potential were languishing. I also discovered Stage 3 is HARD. Very hard. For me, a million times more difficult than writing a first draft.
• brainwave!
• I decided to dump all my chapters and scenes into a new Scrivener folder titled Draft 1
• because I love (LOVE!!) writing first drafts, I decided to treat Draft 2 like a Draft 1
• I rewrote the draft from scratch. At first I found it tough to not peek at the first draft, but it definitely got easier. The changes I needed to make were core changes and because of that, the story changed dramatically, while keeping the same basic plot elements, and I already knew those plot elements, so I didn't peek.

Stage #5 - Unknown

• as I'm evolving as a writer, I know my style will change too
• I've got 5 or 6 stories begging for rewrites (I was stuck fast in Stages 2 & 3 for far too long) and at this point I'm nearly salivating wanting to do a Stage 4 rewrite for each of them
• I wonder if I'll have discovered Stage 5 by the time I get to them all?

Learning to write well (and to rewrite well) is a personal journey. My journey will probably look nothing like yours, but I hope by sharing mine, you might find some ideas to help you move along to the next step. Or suggestions as to what Stage 5 might look like for me!

Do you rewrite? Do your rewrites look anything like mine?

Jemi Fraser is an aspiring author of contemporary romance. She blogs  and tweets while searching for those HEAs.