Write. Write. Write and Rewrite.

In the process of writing, something that is both very important, and sometimes extremely debilitating is rewriting.

First of all, rewriting is important, necessary in most cases. The first draft should be information dump. You want to get everything out on the page so you don’t miss all the amazing parts of your imagination. For a creative writer it’s important to get the information from the imaginary to the physical. Now that it’s on paper, or computer, now’s the time to make it make sense. For the writer the story seems great, but more often then not a reread of what you’ve put down will reveal plot holes, grammar mistakes, items important in the beginning disappear, etc.

Writing is a unique art. Unlike painting or music it’s much harder to get a look at the big picture. Painters can take a step back, musicians can listen through their track, but writer’s have to go back and reread everything, but what’s worse we have to separate our brain reading the story the way we meant it to be read to reading it how we’ve written it.

It would be the equivalent of a painter painting a portion of a picture. They rush through each section, realizing they’ve made mistakes, but their not sure exactly how they want the picture to look yet. Once they finish they step back and see each section put together in one big picture. It looks horrible, the sections don’t go together, there are color’s within each section that don’t match the flow.

Rewriting is essential.

On the other hand, rewriting can be the ending. When writing poetry, or a short story, rewriting isn’t much of a chore. When it only takes a minute or too to read through what’s been written in a few hours you can edit and rewrite multiple times, but for a novel. When your verging on 70 to 80 thousand words rewriting can take months. The craziest part is the time is a small reason rewriting is so crippling.

Everyone wants their story to come out perfectly. Like the painter we can see every stroke that doesn’t match, every section that doesn’t quite line up how we wanted it to. It’s only us though. As the artist we can see the whole of what we’ve created vs what we wanted, but our audience only see’s the art. If the perfectionist bug bites you while creating a story, you’ll never finish. With novels by the time you halfway through a rewrite you’ve already learned a lot making the edits at the beginning of your book outdated.

Rewriting is important, but it can’t take over. At some point the rewriting needs to end. The best way is getting the words in front of a chosen audience who can help you know if the story is being understood how you would like it to be. Rewriting makes the difference between organized thoughts and dreams that are a foggy image that fades before we have a chance to remember it.