Rewrites
Every time I read one of my stories, even if it was published ten years ago, I want to change it. Every single time. This is why I and many other creatives have a 'it's finished and gone now' attitude to their work. We are perfectionists and if we don't turn our back on things we will never let it go.
"Once something is published and I can't change anything I find it unbearable to read it...'
John Green
I rewrite on the word doc. I never print out drafts. I can not justify using vast amounts of paper just for something that I am going to change ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty times. There are not enough trees in the world to sustain the amount of times I change my mind over a word let alone a paragraph, chapter or scene.
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” Elmore Leonard
“I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.” Vladimir Nabokov
Rewriting is the heart of the process, the most fun and the most misery. Rewrites expose your flaws like nothing else will. I have done really stupid things in my first drafts without realising. I've changed a characters name way through a story, or changed their appearance or forgotten a plot point from a previous book (When I am writing a trilogy) that is pivotal to the climax. I've given the same dialogue to different characters and I repeat myself...a lot.
Sometimes the story is choppy when I've shot from one scene to another without proper transitions (which I do a lot). Sometimes it's boring and slow. Other times the plot is too fast and gallops the reader from the beginning to end. Characters need to stop sometimes to take stock of where they are so the readers - who are travelling along the story with them - can catch a breath.
I lose thousands of words in a rewrite. I pare everything down. What I want to achieve is the story I started with in the first draft but told in the best, simplest and most economical way.
I will never be J R R Tolkein or A S Byatt with dense poetic descriptive prose and I don't pretend to be.
I want my characters to tell their own story and hopefully *crossed fingers* they do.