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Sarah Painter

Author of contemporary fiction with a touch of magic

rewrite hell

Writers on writing

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I love quotes. I love snarky ones, inspirational ones, and clever ones. I love those seemingly obvious ones that hit you at just the right time so that their meaning clangs inside your brain like a weight dropped from a great height, rendering your mental landscape forever changed.

I also, perhaps unsurprisingly, love quotes about writing and creativity. This new regular blog feature (whoop) will showcase some of my favourites.

To kick things off, a couple of sentences from bestselling novelist and creator of Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

To balance that with a more positive take on revision, here’s Robert Cormier:

The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

And with that, I will get back to work.

Endings

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Sorry for the lack of bloggage. The big rewrite is going… Well. It’s going.

After feedback from the excellent Storywonk Revision Class, I’ve re-worked my main plot. I needed to beef up the conflict between my protagonist and antagonist and to make everything a bit harder for my main character. I also had to make sure that my antagonist was taking actions that made sense for her, rather than doing stuff because I wanted/needed that stuff to happen. Sigh.

I think I’m almost there. Should be ready to print out and do a final edit next week . Eep.

In the meantime, take a look at this spiffy The End bookend.

It costs £18.95 from Bouf.

[Via Happiness Is]

Rewrite Hell

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So, I’m adding lots of new words (doing the 50,000 in fifty day challenge), but I’m also rewriting the stuff I’ve got, trying to corral the skittish scenes into a cohesive whole.

As always, I’m wishing I had a different ‘process’ – one that was streamlined and efficient. I wish I didn’t splurge out a rubbish first draft and then spend months working out what on earth the whole thing’s supposed to be about. I wish I didn’t have to spend time writing all the stuff that is wrong in order to find the stuff that’s right, but I honestly don’t know how else to do it.

For the organisational, headache-inducing nightmare that is the rewrite, I’ve tried post-it notes and scribbling on a whiteboard, colour-coded spreadsheets, index cards and spider diagrams. Ultimately, it all comes down to the same thing: going through the manuscript over and over again, moving the pieces around, adding all the stuff I missed, and deleting the bad, the boring and the just plain wrong.

Although, writing-advice-addict that I am, I have spent the last hour studying Holly Lisle’s One-Pass Manuscript Revision (recommended by Keris, I think) which appears very sensible and comprehensive. Now I just need to make myself a cup of tea and apply it. Easy. (Sound of hollow laughter).

[Picture is of one of Proust’s manuscript pages, via Proustitute]