Okay hi hello it’s me again back to talk about rewriting and revising. This is going to be an essay because I'm chronically incapable of saying anything concisely at the first shot, and while i’m going to try to be really orderly about it, this is a post on tumblr dot com, so I will not be fully rewriting it. (which, idk, does that undermine my opinion?)
I’m also going to reference some of the earlier responses I saw, because I led with “I disagree with everyone,” so I feel like it would be cowardly of me not to specify what I disagree with. I want to add that I've been told I present my opinions forcefully, such that people sometimes feel that I’m combative or trying to force them to agree with me if they can't mount an adequate defence for their opinions. I haven’t figured out what causes this phenomenon (it may be my tone of voice? In which case hopefully it doesn’t translate into my writing?) but would like to state for the record that I am not trying to say anything bad about the people whose opinions I disagree with, nor am I trying to say that my opinions are The Right Ones. Feel free to find my processes and opinions diametrically wrong for you.
Because I’m neurodivergent as hell, I’m also going to give definitions so that, agree or disagree, we’re at least referring to the same things:
I’m going to use the word “rewrite” to refer to writing out a thing completely from scratch, with or without referencing an earlier iteration.
I’m using it in contrast to the word “revising,” by which I mean making changes within an existing document (even if those changes involve writing new content in that document).
By “draft” I mean an individual iteration of a document, which could be rewritten or revised.
I’m using “pass” to refer to a complete rewrite or revision where you go through the entire document to make a specific type of change. (So a pass generally results in a new draft, though obviously this gets more and more vague the closer you get to a final draft, and different writers feel different ways about what they consider a complete pass or a new draft, and that’s totally fine; I’ll probably be a bit vague in here too).
So rewriting. I used to hate it (and refuse to do it) because why would I bother typing out everything all over again when it was structurally fine and I could save time by just making changes within the thing? (Isn’t the whole point of word processing programmes that I can click and drag and copy and paste and ctrl+z?) At some point I read an article about it that convinced me to give it a try, and you would not believe the difference I saw in the quality of my rewrite—and I mean both “the rewrite was significantly better than the previous draft” and “the quality of the editing pass was significantly better than any revision I had ever done before.” There are a few reasons, I think, that rewriting is so much more effective than revising as a first step:
You don’t have anything to lose. You’re working in a clean document, not directly changing anything in your previous draft, so you have the freedom to make drastic changes if you want to, or to skip sections, rearrange them, completely reword things, play with the vibes—it’s all completely free of consequences, because you aren’t touching your source material.
Your brain is in creative mode, not critical mode. Even though you’re referencing your previous draft, the act of typing it up fresh helps you stay in that creative headspace, so changes feel like new growth and fresh art rather than, idk, trying to cut apart something you love. It feels inherently productive rather than destructive, so it doesn’t get stale.
It's easier to find issues while writing. When you reread the thing you wrote, you know what you expect, and the fact that the words are already composed together on the page makes it feel like a solid extant thing; you’re predisposed to read it as correct. (Think about how easy it is to fill in a missing word in a sentence or not to notice “the the” in the middle of a line.) Rewriting forces you to notice and consider every part of your draft, and you find yourself instinctively fixing or improving things that you wouldn’t have picked out as imperfect in a revision and therefore wouldn’t have thought to change.
You're more aware of the content. Your memory encodes it differently when you're rewriting than when you're drafting or revising, which means you’re more likely to see structural or pacing issues. It’s much easier to notice that you forgot to explain a thing if you reach dialogue about it and realise you’ve never typed the word yet. It’s easier to catch the same phrase repeated in every other page if you’re getting tired of retyping it, or to notice that there’s a big inconsistency if you have to physically write out its context. This is kind of a larger-scale version of the last bullet point—your brain is more likely to fill in the gaps for you when you’re just reading looking for things to change.
So fundamentally, I don’t think the earlier answers have bad advice, I just think they’re missing something; they’re giving you some good next steps, but they won’t do what a rewrite will. Here are my specific thoughts about them:
@amandacanwrite says that “rewrites are for major structural issues,” but I’ve found that one of the most significant things that rewriting does for me is making the voice, tone, and themes much more consistent—and this is in part because a rewrite by definition must go through the entire thing, word by word. It’s like rolling paint across the whole wall instead of trying to find every spot that needs a touch-up and paint over them individually. (Are my metaphors getting dumb? It’s midnight.)
@author-a-holmes points out that “MOST of the time a manuscript doesn’t need a complete overhaul,” which I don’t disagree with as a statement without context. However, I think that it’s a big mistake to conflate “overhaul” with “rewrite.” Rewriting doesn’t have to mean making huge changes; you might rewrite something and discover as you go that it’s in really good shape and that most of your rewriting process is just copying down stuff that you really do still like (which is honestly such a nice experience), but the point is that you look closely at is as you go. You keep your words, not because they’re there by default and you didn’t notice anything wrong with them, but because you evaluated them and found that they were worth actively rewriting to keep.
The description of editing chapter by chapter sounds like a really great process for a much later draft, after you no longer need the context of the whole story; but you can’t address big-picture plot structure, pacing, etc. when you’re looking at a single chapter out of context. You have to do something before the chapter-by-chapter revisions or you’ll wind up with something that’s still disjointed, badly paced, or whatever else your first draft is, because you polished each piece but didn’t step back to see how they all look together. (To be clear I’m not sure based on that post whether you’re saying you do all of those bullet points for each chapter in isolation or whether the chapter-by-chapter part is a separate note; I read them as sequential but if that’s not what you mean, apologies for misinterpreting. I might try the individual chapter thing for my next pass on Haven.)
With all of that in mind, I’ll outline my general process. The order you do some of these passes in or the number of different things you include in a pass might vary, and you might do some of them multiple times (circling back to the plot hole fixing step is my sisyphean eternity). The key thing is that multiple passes are essential, because, to give you another completely un-researched metaphor, you have to dig a gem out of the dirt and clean it off before you can cut and polish it.
1. Round off the first draft. In my rough draft, I don’t go back to make changes earlier in the draft unless absolutely necessary; instead, I leave myself comments to check on afterward. Some of these are later-draft-me problems, but some of them are things I should fix before I consider my first draft done, like “add the transition here” or “let’s change the way this magical item works—go back and fix earlier references to it.” I try to run back over the draft and catch all of the comments that I can do immediately while I’m still riding the high of having finished and before I start forgetting what I’ve written.
2. Leave it to cool. I thought this was standard writing advice, but I’ve discovered many people haven’t been told this, so I’ll bring it up here: don’t start editing immediately! You’re still too close to accurately assess the thing you’ve written. You can’t tell which pieces might be confusing or missing, you’re still saturated in the vibe you wanted to convey so you’re unlikely to sense where the tone falters, and you’re still in that post-creation euphoria. Studies have shown that people assign higher value to their own creations than to creations by other people (even if they're of the same or even greater quality, objectively). That isn’t to say you should devalue your work but that when it’s freshly finished and you're still immersed in the aches and efforts that went into it and it still feels so near your heart you can almost taste it... you’re in no state to make useful judgments about its quality. So set it aside for a while. Leave next-draft-you loads of comments, then close that document and pick up some other project for a while. After a few months (I aim for a minimum of three), when you’ve forgotten some of it, when it doesn’t feel so precious and raw, when you don’t have every line etched in your working memory—then take it back out. Get a comfy workspace, get a snack, and get to work.
3. Rewrite. Create a new document—not a new section of your document, but a completely new file. I use scrivener, so I create a new scrivener project.
Open your rough draft on half your screen, open the blank document on the other half, and start writing.
Don’t reread your draft first—you want completely fresh eyes on it.
You’re allowed to diverge as far as you want from the rough draft or copy it as exactly as you like, but you’re not allowed to touch your rough draft document itself. Everything goes in your rewritten draft.
If you know large changes you want to make already, like rearranging some scenes or adding a chapter, do that on the rewrite if you can. It's easier to make the transitions work at this stage than later. Also, later if you cut and paste pieces, you might not notice things that don't work around them. If your adjustments reveal a metaphorical crack in the foundation, you want to discover it during the rewrite, not several passes into revisions. This is where I often find that my rewrite splits off a bit from the original, because I'll realise that something seems off, and I'll write myself into a better space.
Take notes as you go. Do whatever else helps you keep rewriting without getting bogged down in complicated fixes that you'll do in a later pass. I sometimes wind up creating an outline as I rewrite to better visualise the order of the scenes or the cause and effect. I often start colour-coding as I go, especially if I start to feel like the pacing is funny (for me it’s often coding something like dialogue-heavy vs action-heavy scenes so I can see the balance, or flagging every scene that includes a certain repeating piece of foreshadowing so I can see whether I’m spacing it out or whatever).
This is also a good opportunity to list specific details to check in later passes, especially recurring issues. For example, this is often where I start making a list of terms I might be overusing so I can check for them later (it is not worth trying to fix them all in the rewrite, because you’re going to need several more passes in which you might significantly change or cut those sentences anyway). This is often the pass where I notice things like inconsistent voice in a character’s dialogue, technical details I need to research, significant pacing issues, imbalances (such as a lot more chapters in one character’s POV than another’s or certain settings being significantly more detailed than others). The things you can and want to fix on the rewrite, fix as you go. Other things you'll plan to come back to. Leaving yourself lots of comments in the rewrite gives you a starting point for subsequent passes.
4. Fill plot holes, reorder scenes, and add missing stuff. Your notes from the rewrite should be really helpful at this point. This is the structural pass where you fix the big issues you saw on the rewrite but didn’t let yourself get bogged down in. This is the part where you move whole chunks because they’re in the wrong order or the pacing is funky. If you left yourself “add a transition here” types of notes, this is the time to add the transition (or to decide, as I often do, that a transition isn’t actually needed).
5. Time travel aka chronology aka “how the fuck did they to all those things before sunset?” I’m awful at remembering how long anything has been while I’m drafting, so I take a pass to go through and check all the references to passage of time to make sure they make sense, both for stuff like how much has happened in a given time and for having accurate references (if the narration says “three days ago," i better not have had five sunset scenes). Sometimes I make a little calendar to be sure things actually fit into the time I’ve written. I might have to repeat the plot holes pass after this. This can also be an opportunity to fix pacing issues by adjusting the in-story time that passes between events. I once took a story that was set over the course of two weeks and that felt kind of rambly and decided to see how few days I could get the events to fit in—I wound up shortening the timespan to six days, and let me tell you—that did miracles for the sense of urgency in the pacing.
6. Vibe checks. This is a series of passes, because for each pass you have to pick one or two things to focus on, and then you only fix those things through the pass. This helps you be consistent. For example, I have two main characters with significantly different dialogue styles and body language, and it’s easy to get them wrong when I’m bouncing back and forth, so I took one pass where I looked at every one of Helen’s lines and movements and fixed all of them, and I did nothing else. That way I got into the right tone for her and stayed there all through. Then I did another pass for her partner. Things you might need to look at in vibe check passes also include descriptions of settings, key themes, important pieces of intentional foreshadowing or clue-leaving, the weather, etc. Anything that needs to be tonally consistent from start to finish—this is the time to check on it.
7. Cuts. I put this off until after the other stuff because it can be hard to tell what does or doesn’t contribute to the story before you have the structure, pacing, voice, etc. smoothed out. Sometimes I have notes about what I might cut (from earlier passes). Sometimes this involves sending it to a friend to read before I actually remove anything—often I do that if I don’t feel sure about what I think needs to be cut or if I really don’t want to cut it (having someone else independently tell me that scene isn’t earning its place helps me feel more secure about it). I’m wordy (can you tell?) and always have way too many words in a novel, so a cut pass is essential for me. I might do separate cut passes for larger stuff (like cutting whole paragraphs or scenes) and for smaller stuff (like individual words or sentences).
8. Making it pretty. This is the revision pass that a lot of people really like—reading through and tinkering with the wording, playing with individual sentences, deciding whether the right word really is lightning or lightning bug (thanks, Mark Twain)… I like this pass, anyway. You’re being productive but you also get to just kind of reread the thing. This is also a good spot to do continuity checks that you can't use ctrl+F for, if you didn't do that during your vibe checks, and to have a general eye out for stuff that seems off. I recommend some time before this pass so that you have fresher eyes.
9. Ctrl+F fixes. This is the part where you check how frequently you actually reuse the phrase “took a deep breath” (callout post for me), remove or replace every other use of the word “just” (callout post again for me), double check that you really did fix every instance of that name you kept changing your mind about, and otherwise clean up things that you know are recurring issues for you, personally. I have a list of my pet phrases to check for, as well as a list of my most common weird typos or misspellings, words with British vs American spellings (I’m woefully inconsistent), etc. Ctrl+F your way through for each thing so that you don’t have to remember 15 individual foibles and idiosyncrasies to look out for while proofreading.
10. Proofread. If I’m being paid, I go bottom to top, which is like. The Correct Way To Proofread according to at least one of my professors in an editing class in university, but with a novel, I read top to bottom. It is, again, a nice little treat for me to feel productive (I’m proofreading!) while mostly just enjoying rereading my thing.
11. Send it to someone. I’m likely to have done this at least once earlier in the process, but I absolutely send it to someone at this point. Then, based on their feedback, I repeat passes as needed.
It’s not a fast process, and depending on your goals, your writing style, the way your brain processes information, etc., it might not work for you. One thing i thought was normal but that I have discovered isn't universal is that I think best while typing—I find what I say as I go, and I am always more likely to sort something out effectively if I'm putting it on a screen and writing it out as I go. But that isn't the only thing that makes rewriting a great strategy for me, and if you haven’t rewritten at all ever, I highly recommend you try it, just once, to see if it helps you.
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