Rewriting

Justine Larbalestier says all sorts of really intelligent things about rewriting on her blog:

There are two basic kinds of rewriting: structural and sentence level. Most beginner writers get caught up in sentence level changes. They go over their manuscripts deleting and switching words around (what’s called line editing in the biz). They do this before they’ve learned how to fix the structure. The result is lots of shifting around of deck chairs while the Titanic sinks.

Structural rewrites are the kind that change the genre of your story (this would be so much better with a vampire), the order of events (wouldn’t it make more sense if the quokkas were stolen in the first chapter?), the relationships of the characters (if they were brother and sister it would be way more intense), the setting (have you actually been to Sydney?—I’m not buying the ease with which your character walked from Surry Hills to Dural), what point of view it’s in (you know Hans is kind of boring but Greta rocks—why don’t you have her tell the story?), whether it’s told in past or present tense (if the narrator is telling the tale from beyond the grave putting it in present tense makes no sense), and so forth.

Trying to get new writers out of thinking of sentence level tweaking as ‘rewriting’ and into structure is really tough. You change a sentence, spot a typo, it feels like *work accomplished*. But moving chapters around, or changing characters, that feels like *more work* and is often hard to quantify whether you made it better or not.

Filed under the topic On Writing: Craft on January 3rd 2008 at 4:19 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.