Thursday, April 19, 2012

I kinda love rewrites

In case you're new here (and who am I kidding--everyone's new here!), I just wrote my first book. I've been writing short stories and attempts at books and fanfiction since I was in high school, but I finally managed to sit down and bust out 100k words all on the same subject with all the same characters and whatnot. I'm pretty happy about it.

I do something that most writing advice type things will tell you not to do: I edit as I go. I kind of can't help it. I write a chapter, read it, and edit it. Rinse and repeat. It's part of my process. Because of that, when I set about doing the rewrites for my book, I thought I wouldn't have that much to do. It's all already been edited like four times, right?

Arrogance, thy name is first time writer. I read the whole book through once and found a couple of little things. Then I put it aside for a week and didn't touch it, and now I'm reading it again, slowly, and I'm finding more nitpicky type things (and the occasional typo, egad!) to fix, plus major scenes that need overhauls. My mom is reading it, too, and she's making notes as she goes, and I'm fixing or altering according to what she's saying as I go, too.

As a result I've drastically changed the order of a few things, to the point that I'll have to read the whole thing from the beginning again to know if I like it. I've also re-written some weak scenes that've bugged me since day one, and I've fleshed out some things that need fleshing.

Point is, I knew I needed an outside opinion before I knew if any of it was any good or if it was all rubbish, and at least now I know. Of course, she hasn't gotten to the ending yet, and I hate writing endings....

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