Rewriting—Part Two

I had brunch with a couple of novelists last week and, as always happens with writers, you sit around talking about important things, then things happening in our lives… and eventually the talk turns to writing. We each talked about what we were currently working on—both of my friends had bestselling novels come out in the last year—and we talked about the process of writing. Shop talk.

One of my friends sighed at one point and talked about how she’d just had to cut 50 pages of her novel.

50 pages. Gulp. That’s a lot to have to cut.

She talked about what brought her to the realization that she had to make that cut.

“It was getting harder and harder to move forward with my story. Normally I look forward to sitting down and seeing where my story’s going to take me today. But I was avoiding going to my office to work, and when I sat down I was sighing—it was a struggle. So I asked myself, ‘When had it started being a struggle? ’ And I flipped back and saw that it was all going really well until about 50 pages ago. There was a turn there, a plot point, and from that point on the writing had become tough, hard to tackle each day.”

“So I reread those pages and started making changes in them to fix the problem I thought I had… but after a few hours of that I realized the real problem. Those 50 pages after that story turn had been a mistake. They were wrong. My story wasn’t working now because of the direction I had decided to go back then. So I cut ‘em. And now it’s back to square one, back to making it work so I can go forward and make it flow again.”

It takes courage to make a decision like that. When you’ve spent so much time on a project, you want every page to build on the one that came before. And when something isn’t working you want to fix it and make it work. You have to have a lot of nerve to cut that large a swath of your work.

The tendency when rewriting is to try and work on what you have—to work on each line, each page, until it’s what you want it to be. And that’s a good way to begin. But sometimes that’s just not possible, sometimes you have to throw it out and start over—whether it’s a scene, a chapter in a book, or half your screenplay, sometimes you need to simply do it over in order for it to work.

Always give page-by-page rewriting a shot, but if that doesn’t work, have the guts to do it again… and maybe again and again—until you know it’s right.

Copyright © Diane Lake

24Sep17

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