Rewriting—Part One

Wouldn’t it be nice if every word you poured onto the page was golden? Each word built upon the one before it, dialogue was pristine, narrative was perfect and each page was so good you just knew a reader couldn't wait to turn the page.

If only.

Remember that the person you’re writing your script for is not the star you’d want to play the lead, it’s the reader. The lowly reader, barely able to make the rent on the apartment he/she shares with three other low-level industry friends somewhere in Burbank… This is the person you’re appealing to, so this is the person you want to wow. If you don’t wow the reader your script will never make it to that star you see playing the lead. So even the first draft has to be stellar.

And how do you make it stellar? You rewrite the *&(* out of it.

Rewriting is tough. You’re basically saying, when you change something, that your first instinct wasn’t good enough—so depending on your ego, you might not want to make those changes, because you want to believe that those first instincts were terrific. And hey, when you wrote that scene, you probably felt your instinct was right on the money. But now, when you’re in rewrite phase, you need to go back and examine every line, every exchange, every description and see how it could be better.

The oft-quoted Hemingway phrase is true: “Good writing is like an iceberg—9/10ths of it is below the surface.” And this was a man who knew about rewriting. He’s saying that 90% of what you write in that first draft will be changed, will be rewritten.

90%?? Surely that’s a bit much.

Well, guess what, it’s not.

And the interesting thing to note here is that Hemingway probably wouldn’t be Hemingway if he’d given his agent his first draft. He might have ended up some marginal writer who never got a contract after his first or second book. Who knows?

But what Hemingway knew is that good writing deserves tending. And that means going over and over and over it.

There are many techniques for this. One of the easiest is to, each day, go back and rewrite the pages you did yesterday. Begin your writing session by going over yesterday’s pages and making them better. Only then do you start writing new pages. This allows you to get into the process of rewriting, of making it part of the ordinary way you create—and I guarantee, even doing just this much will improve your work.

You might then, when you get to major points in your work—say the end of act one—go back and do a major rewrite. Try the whole act another way. Why not? Why not spend the time writing and writing until you get the perfect act before you proceed with act two?

When you start to think about it, and when you start to incorporate rewriting into your routine, it will take you longer to finish a project. But guess what? You’ll have a way better project—one that might just wow that reader back in Burbank.

Copyright © Diane Lake

17Sep17

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