All Writing Is Rewriting

Arghhhh! I am back to editing my first manuscript and I'm finding the old adage “All writing is rewriting” is so true. After finishing my second book, it was time to go back to the first story and get it ready to start submitting to agents and editors.

But the rewriting is almost harder than writing the story from the beginning. I am very fortunate to have my writing partners who can listen to me as I work out different problems and help me navigate the revisions. I also have been lucky enough to have a writer from a local writer’s group take me under her wing. She graciously read the first three chapters of my novel offering one very necessary yet very difficult suggestion—deep point of view. The thing is I thought I was writing in deep point of view. Turns out not so much. So how does that work?

First, I am just learning what deep POV is. As a reader, I instinctively know when I’m in the character’s head. Many recent romance novels toggle back and forth between the hero’s and heroine’s point of view. It’s easy as a reader to know whose head I’m in and when. But as a writer, that’s harder to make happen than you would think. First of all, just telling the story from a particular character’s point of view is not necessarily deep point of view. Who knew? One of the biggest hurdles I’ve noticed to deep POV is verb choice and tense. As I’ve said before, tenses make me tense. Choosing the right verb is hard. What emotions and actions do I really want to convey to the reader? Is that really the best word choice? (I second guess everything. Thank goodness Karen is a master of tenses and connotations. She’s steered me out of some pickles numerous times.) For example, “Tears welled in Nora’s eyes.” becomes “She blinked back the tears threatening to spill from her eyes.” Third person point of view requires the past tense. But which past tense is sometimes hard to know. Past perfect? Past participle? Most of the time this is fairly straightforward, but I find myself second guessing this more now that I am thinking about deep POV. Do I have the correct verb, and do I have the correct tense for this situation? Baaahh!

Another thing about deep POV is removing most of the names I used. Using the pronouns she/he helps the reader be less removed from what’s happening in the story. I was putting the names in the dialogue more often than I needed to help the reader keep track of who is speaking during a conversation. I did this because as I new writer, it helped me keep track of who was speaking. But I also did it with my readers in mind. I read pretty fast, and oftentimes I skim over dialogue. When that happens, I sometimes miss who’s speaking. But I’m finding now, that doesn’t really help the reader. It takes them out of the story and into the narrator’s head.

That’s something else I had to realize. The reader shouldn’t hear a narrator. Or maybe it’s rather that the narrator should be the character whose point of view you are writing in. But it should not be an outside person inserting themselves into the story. I thought I was writing from the character’s head. I wasn’t. Taking so many of the names out of speech tags and dialogue has helped this. Changing verbs has also helped. But what else I’ve learned is that changing the order or structure of sentences is also a huge tool in crafting deep POV. For example, “Claudia took the seat offered” becomes “Taking the seat offered, Claudia laughed and continued.” But that brings about another problem. You have to watch how often you change around your sentences and in what way you do it? Too many participle or gerund phrases can also spoil the writing.

All of these tasks make the rewriting process difficult and time-consuming. Maybe the more I do it the easier it will get. Practice makes perfect and all that. But there will always be rewriting to do. A teacher I used to work with told her students that editing was fixing the grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors in your writing. The revising was the fun part, the rewriting part. I tend to agree with that assessment, though I do both at the same time. But the revising, the rewriting, is working on the meat of the story and thus much more difficult. You really have to dig deep as a writer and be willing to look critically at your story. For me, it is intensely rewarding when I get it right, but it is also a struggle to go back through and tackle what is wrong with the story. So many things to work on at the same time. Not just POV and grammar, but timeline issues, character arcs, story consistencies. All of these need addressing during the revision phase. Some people are great at doing that as they go. Some planners don’t have much work to do because they’ve already worked many issues out during pre-writing. Pantsers may have more to work on. But even the best laid plans can have problems that need to be tackled after the fact. None of us are ever truly finished with our work, I think. I’ve listened to many authors speak over the years, and they all agree that a work is never perfect. There are always things which should have been fixed or done differently.

That, friends, brings me to my next blog topic. Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. How do you know when the work is ready to query, send to an agent, self-publish, etc.? I need to give that some more thought. When I come to some conclusions, I’ll be sure to share what I’ve learned with you here.