Pressing On Through The Re-Write

Re-vision-ing the things you already made, and embracing the change

Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash

I’m halfway through my third draft of a novel. And the old saying that “all writing is re-writing” is proving accurate. I’ve re-structured, re-outlined, re-ordered chapters, scenes, paragraphs, sentences. But more than anything else, I just re-write the darn thing. Because each picture that comes into my head as I reach the next moment, and the next moment, is different from what was on the page from draft two. The story reforms, it renews. And that’s the whole point of revision, isn’t it?

In the words of Margaret Atwood:

Revisions means re-vision. You’re seeing it anew. And quite frequently, when you’re doing that, you see possibilities that you didn’t see before and that light up parts of the book in a way that wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t done that.

This is also why it is important to not be overly precious about your ideas.

I am a big believer in Stephen King’s philosophy that the good ideas are the ones that stick around. There’s no point being precious about a scene if you can see, in your mind’s eye, a better way forward. Because, at the end of the day, that’s the part that really matters. Moving forward. And you keep moving forward till you link up with the next train car of the story, rearrange furniture or throw it out the window, rebuild, then keep moving to the next car.

But sometimes, you get to the end of a familiar train car, and find that there’s a car sized gap between the car you just rewrote and the next car (or chapter, in my case). But to continue with this train car metaphor, I had rewritten so much that I found myself missing a car. I had inadvertently added several new scenes to the book (almost half a chapter); they just hadn’t been written yet. And yet there they were, those empty pages sitting right in front of me. And I confess, it was a little daunting—exciting, but daunting all the same. I had gotten into such a groove of re-writing things that had at least some shape, that when I realized I had created a blank new space that needed to be filled, I froze. Why? I think, because it was late, I was tired, and I wanted to go to sleep. But I knew that the scenes needed to exist. And I always try to reach a little goal, hit a little milestone (no matter how small), whenever I sit down to write. And so, even though I was tired, I knew that I still had a little more in me before my eyes shut involuntarily, but not enough to write this whole new section. It would have to be picked up the next day.

So I said to myself, “just write down the gist, the broad strokes. You can fill it in later.” And I began with a sentence that felt like it skipped right to the most necessary part, right into the middle of the next scene. But I knew where I was, and where I had been right before that, so it was okay. In fact, it kind of worked. Huh. So I wrote the next sentence, broader still, a shortcut to get my characters moving down the hill (both literally and metaphorically). And that worked too. And before I knew it, I had written the broad strokes of the scene. *little sigh* And so I did the same with the next, one. All in all, it was maybe four or five two-to-three-sentence length paragraphs. And thirty minutes later, there they were: the few scenes ( in condensed form) that I needed to link me up with the next train car.

And here’s the weird part. When I read them back, they didn’t feel fast, or condensed, or like the broad strokes of scenes. Or, I should say, they did, but they felt right that way. I didn’t feel the need to change them or expand them. I actually couldn’t see a better way forward (at that moment) for those scenes. They served the purpose they needed to serve in the time they needed to serve it.

Which made me wonder: had I frozen at the border of writing those scenes because I was tired? Or because I initially assumed that they would have to be longer, bigger, more action-packed scenes? That more “stuff” had to happen? We writers often have such conflict-oriented minds, that sometimes we think that every scene needs to be packed with trouble, with tension, with conflict. But sometimes what we really need is a breather, or, in the case of the scenes I was writing, a fast (but still tense, but basically out of the woods) transition to the next chapter, setting, and mood. Because the preceding chapter had been plenty tense.

It reminded me of what Ursula K. Le Guin had to say about this platitude of conflict centered storytelling:

Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.”

*deep, meditative sigh while imagining Ursula K. Le Guin’s calming voice*

I’ll be honest, “slow it down” is a note I have received on a few occasions when people read my work. And so it is important to remind myself that, sometimes, what the story needs is not more conflict, but change. Change in mood, change in setting, and maybe even a change in the type of scenes, paragraphs, sentences, or words being used. And change can be scary. But that’s half the fun!

What I'm Reading Now:

• Dracula, Bram Stoker

• The She-Devil, Robert E. Howard

• America: The Life and Times of America Chavez, Gabby Rivera

• Ms. Marvel, G. Willow Wilson