"Don't rewrite until you've finished first draft"-

"Don't rewrite until you've finished first draft"-

i've always heard the advice "don't rewrite until you've finished oyur first draft," but i find myself guilty of this.

sometimes it's just my perfectionism, but several times now i've found holes in the plot/ badly thought out parts that just need to be redone for me to continue. after rewriting chapter one, which i posted in "share your work," i am discarding chapter 2 because the plot contained therein simply doesn't work. i hit a dead-end in chapter 5 and i'm fixing up the beginning to help me past it.

is this normal practice? is this a violation of the rule? is the rule even correct?

Re: "Don't rewrite until you've finished first draft&qu

My gut instinct is "do what works". But having met quite a few people who have never got to The End because they keep going back and fiddling with things makes me think that rewriting before you finish the whole thing is a dangerous practice. It may work for some, but for a whole lot of folks, rewriting keeps them from moving forward. And while we're on the subject of rewriting, I think line edits are a total waste of time until you've finished the first draft. After the first draft is done, you can review the whole thing for style and continuity and make changes accordingly.

My .02. Your mileage may vary.

Re: "Don't rewrite until you've finished first draft&am

that's kind of what i figured.

Dear Flawed (and aren't we all??)

I can't stand it any more. It's a sickness, I know, but...

please change your signature. It's "apologize", not "apoligize".

Thanks. I can't stand incorrect spellings. It's a disease, I know. I can only hope it isn't fatal. (Probably not, unless it leads someone, some day, to kill me after one too many such posts...)

I'll leave quietly now... :gone

Re: Dear Flawed (and aren't we all??)

betty- it's fine.

i feel the same way. for some reason i can never spell apologize correctly.

it's weird. i'm a spelling bee champion. i won my (home)school bee twice times and tok third and fourth in my regional bees.

i cna spell "maxixe," "pretrophilus," "rattatouile," "seppuku," "miasma," you name it. but not apologize.

actually, when i wrote the sig i meant to type it with the "o", but hit the adjacent key by mistake.

but then, every time i looked at it i couldn't figure out which way it should be, and i was afraid to ask.

thanks.

EDIT: you didn't give an answer to the poll.

Re: Dear Flawed (and aren't we all??)

Flawed, why don't you just change it now?

edit as you go

You have to do what works, pure and simple. And the way you know somethign is working is that you type "The End" in a reasonable amount of time, and then sell the novel. Many writers don't touch anything until the first draft is finished. That's how I work. My favorite quotation is "Don't get it right, get it written." --James Thurber.

But Dean Koontz rewrites each page as many as thirty times before moving on to the next page, and it seems to work pretty well for him. But the thing is, he still finished the novel pretty quickly.

I don't have to worry about plot holes as I go, simply because I don't believe at all in plotting a novel, ever, for any reason. But there are times when I'm seriously tempted to back up and fix some dialogue, or add a character, or eliminate a character. But I don't because I know I can do all this easily in the next draft.

And because when I do finish the first draft, I quite often discover I didn't really want to make thos changes, after all.

But you simply have to do what works. If you're making steady prograss and the novel is getting longer and longer and closer to the end all the time, whatever you're doing is probably working. If the novel isn't getting steadily longer and close rto the end, whatever you;re doing probably isn't working.

Re: edit as you go

I tend to spend a lot of time trying to get the first one or two chapters written, and "right", but then I'm off until I get to the end. If something needs to be added, or subtracted, it happens *after* I get the "through-line"

Re: edit as you go

>If you're making steady prograss and the novel is getting longer and longer and closer to the end all the time, whatever you're doing is probably working. If the novel isn't getting steadily longer and close rto the end, whatever you;re doing probably isn't working.

This seems like the key thing to me. When I was writing my (as yet unpublished) novel, I set a goal of writing at least 1,000 new words a day. This didn't include any rewrites or editing. I ended up rewriting a lot of it as I was working my way through, but everyday it got 1,000 words longer.

Re: edit as you go

I found with my first novel, whenever i got stuck i would go back and read the two or three chapters before. That usually managed to get me back on track so i could continue, however i almost always managed to find something in those chapters that needed changing, enhancing, etc. So while it took me longer to get back to the last chapter, the previous ones would get some much needed editing and i could feel good about what i had written.

Re: edit as you go

Definitely do what works. The advice is important for some people, because those people would never achieve anything except a perfect first chapter if they didn't take it .

FWIW, I don't consciously follow it, but I do have a rule of producing at least 600 new words every time I sit down to write. After I've done that, I feel free to revise anything I've done before. I don't do it often, but it happens. I do think revising is easier after you reach "THE END", though.

Avoid editing

Comments from a novice.

Earlier in my work I would do what Stace describes. Now I'm of the opinion that slogging through to the end of the book is the way I want to do it. So I voted for 'Avoid'.

I've found that there are a number of details that I've worried about in the early going that are going to have to be reworked or discarded. Whole chapters are going to have to be rewritten because of things that I'm learning about my characters. I'm not going to do that now because if I change the story again in order to get the plot to work up to the proper climax, I may want to restore the original version in part or in whole.

By analogy, the climax is the handle of the whip and everything before it is the cord. Stuff moves around as it must in accordance with the dictates of the handle.

So I'm just working on getting all the words before THE END into the manuscript. Next time, I may spend time to create an outline with greater detail so that I can be more confident about fooling with character development and setting.

JB

Re: Avoid editing

I'm with the "fix major plot holes" group because when I first started writing my novel, the very first draft of the first chapter came out pretty much unpublishable, and didn't lead me in a direction that would have got me to the climax.

It did, however, help me learn about the characters. So I rewrote it, then worked through to the end.

However, I would advise against substantial rewriting until you've reached THE END. I started doing that and spent a lot of time playing with the first hundred pages or so when the novel wasn't even finished and it took two years to get finished.

If I hadn't had rabid beta readers breathing down my neck all that time, it wouldn't have been finished at all...

I owe a lot to my long-suffering beta readers...:kiss

Ruth

Revising

During the first draft of my novel, when I sat down at the computer, I'd reread what I'd written the day before, fixing little stuff like punctuation, stupid sentences, but not making major changes. Then I'd be in the "flow" of the novel and charge ahead with the writing. It saved some time during the second draft, so I could concentrate on the big stuff, like characters, plot lines, etc.

(Did it work? I dunno, I haven't sold the mss yet!)

rewrite

The one place where I don't follow my own advice is the opening scene. For me, the opening scene, the first three to ten pages, is everything. The opening scene not only sets the novel on course, but it also sets up the ending of the novel. Sometimes the opening scene is fine on the first write, but sometimes I'll have to rewrite it a dozen times before moving on.

The opening scene is everything for me. If I get it right, I know the rest of the novel will be fine, and I can write straight through to the end quickly.

Re: "Don't rewrite until you've finished first draft&am

>>i've always heard the advice "don't rewrite until you've finished oyur first draft," but i find myself guilty of this.<<

Why "guilty"? It's not a crime. I hate it that writers are encouraged to feel bad about working this way.

Plenty of people do it this way. Including, as I've probably said a lot too many times on this board, me. I start every writing day by revising what I did the day before--and usually the day before that and the day before that, right back to the start of the chapter sometimes. More times than I can count, I've found that the only way to get my head straight about going forward is to go back--sometimes way back--and assess what I've already done.

Writing can be like laying down track, where you put every section end to end and only look ahead. Or it can be like building a drystone wall, where the placement of each new stone depends on the placement of all the stones underneath it, and you have to look down before you can look up.

As with everything, a balance needs to be kept. Constant revision can certainly become an excuse for never getting on with it. But as others have said, you have to do what works for you, not blindly follow a method because someone told you it was a rule.

- Victoria

rewriting as you go.

One other thing about rewriting as you go. With a novel, I do rewrite the opening scene many times, but there's sometimes one other thing that causes a pause for a rewrite. If I come to place where I think, "Oops, that really was a dumb thing to write, and it won't work at all" I'll make a note to rewrite it later. But if the note just raises as many questions as it answers, I sometimes go back and change things right then.

This doesn't happen often at all, but it does happen.

And sometimes I'll start writing a sentence, get almost to the end of it, realize it's a real clunker and there's a far better way of wording it, I cross out with my pen, or run the delete key back, and rewrite that sentence. If you think of a far better way to write a sentence, or a really good turn of phrase jumps into your head, I think it's best to get it down right then, else you might forget it, or forget where you meant to use it.

Writing in longhand means I usually think about a sentence before I put it down on paper, sometimes running two or three variations through my head before committing anything to paper, but just about every page of longhand writing will contain one or two sentences that have been crossed out and rewritten on the spot.

It happens a bit more often at the computer. When writing on the computer, a sentence a paragraph or two up will jump out at me, and it will be bad. Sometimes it doesn't even make sense. That one I'll rewrite.

But whatever I do and however I do it, I make sure I advance the novel a certain amount each day.

Wirth short stories, I'm much more likely to go beginning to end without rewriting anything because the length means nothing is going to be forgotten or misplaced, and the rewriting will start soon, anyway. I'll often write the first draft of a short story beginning to end in three or four hours, so rewriting as I go just isn't necessary.

Re: Avoid editing

Yeshanu and JB are right, I think. :smack It took me 2 years to finish my novel, and i probably could have finished it in half that time if i'd just stuck to it and waited until the end to edit.
So, i guess i'm changing my mind. (i'm a woman, i can do things like that) i think you should wait until you can type THE END before going back and editing anything.

Re: Avoid editing

Flawed, I don't write novels, thank God (I'd never finish one), but when I do articles, I usually do what one writer I know calls a "brain dump" and then go back and start tinkering. I may rewrite something a number of times (don't ask me how many times I've rewritten one particular book review and the latest restaurant review unless you want me to start sobbing in despair), but I try to at least get it out on paper all the way through first, FWIW.

And I know what you mean about spelling. I'm a spelling champ except out ould, when I become a total idjit. Can't spell it unless I can see it, and even then - is it "neccesary" or "necessary"? "Brocolli" or "broccoli"? "Cincinnati" or "Cincinatti"? Certain words I either have to look up each and every time or keep on a cheat sheet nearby when writing. Argh.

Re: Avoid editing

thanks to everyone: this has been a really interesting discussion.

i, too re-wrote my opening scene many times. i have realized that some of my rewriting is just line-editing that i don't need to do at this stage. but i've needed to do some re-writing. one pretty major re-write was precipitated by the deletion of a character i realized wasn't interesting. as a result his role in the story had to be shifted onto other people. now i'm stalled on chapter 5 and rewriting chapter 2 so that chapter 5 will work better.

James- you don't need to fix plot holes? that's interesting. i had always thought that unplotted writing would result in more plot holes.

or do you mean you don't worry about them until after first draft? i guess that could work, except that i sometmes have a problem so huge it simply must be fixed before i move on.

Re: Avoid editing

James- you don't need to fix plot holes? that's interesting. i had always thought that unplotted writing would result in more plot holes.

Click to expand...

Now THAT'S a discussion worth having (not that this one hasn't been dandy to watch).

Telling a story without an outline, without "plotting" it, can be easy or difficult, can result in gaping plot holes you can drive a truck through and some of the most tightly plotted, natural prose ever. This gets easier with experience, as I'm sure James will attest. It's really just developing an ability to tell stories freely, and, over time, you learn what works, and what doesn't, and you apply those things automatically to your writing.

plot holes

No, I don't need to fix plot holes. I don't plot. I tell a story. If you tell a story, plot comes along as a by-product. So does subplot. As Ray Bradbury says, "Plot is the footprints left in the snow after the characters have passed."

I think most who don't write this way assume it's some sort of stream of consciousness writing, but it isn't. It's what Stephen King calls "situational writing." There's a difference. A big one.

It means the opening situation is what's important, and it's why it can take me as long to write the first chapter as it does to write the rest of the novel. If I get the opening situation right, all the pieces in place, the rest of the novel is, essentially, already written.

Good story structure is almost always circular. A story turns back on itself, so the opening and the ending are really the same thing, like a snake biting its own tale. I think many writers have trouble with endings because they take their eyes off the opening, or because they don't know how to set up the opening situation.

The opening situation ask questions, poses problems, and sets up character issues that need to be dealt with. The ending answers the questions, solves the problems, and resolves the character issues. The story between the two is the process that carries this out.

If the opening situation is set up properly, and if I let the story tell itself, the portion of the novel between the opening and the ending is a lot like a chess game where everything is action and reaction, all aimed at reaching the ending.

And all this sounds a lot more complicated than it is. It all boils down to the fact that if the opening is right, not an easy thing, the ending is already written, and the rest of the novel will almost write itself.

Re: Avoid editing

Do what works.

That said, I believe that if you constantly rewrite and fuss with the prose, you're slowing yourself down and discrupting your creative energy. I speak from experiece -- it took me over a year to write the first half of my first draft... then I just let it rip and I finished the second half in less than 3 months. I found the "don't rewrite until you finish" method more enjoyable.

I ended up spending considerable amount of time doing the rewrites and editing anyway. So it's better to defer that to until after the first draft is done -- gives me a sense of accomplishment anyway.

Re: plot holes

I don't plot. I tell a story.

Click to expand...

care to expound? what's the fundamental difference, to you? how do you define plot?

I suppose I'd define plot as simply an order of events, but a story is simply a relation of that order of events.

Re: plot holes

Some people write that way, as James described. Stephen King does. They know what the story is -- they set it up, put some interesting people in an interesting situation/setting and let them run... the "plot" comes naturally as the characters start doing things. (Kinda like playing a game of Sim City...)

Some people like to plot it out, like a map. They want to know exactly how it goes from point A to point B until they get to the final destination.

I'm in between. I like to plot out my big set pieces. Then I let my characters do their thing between these set pieces, and the plot/subplot sort of fall into place that way.