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Reworking stories is something I do all of the time given I don’t think anyone has ever written the perfect first draft in one go. I know I don’t!
I love the much missed Sir Terry Pratchett’s view “the first draft is just you telling yourself the story”. Spot on and the second draft is where you get rid of all of the things you realise you don’t need. Then comes the next draft and so on. Eventually, you end up with a finely honed piece of work which is ready to submit somewhere.
Reworking For All Writers
I’ve long believed what matters is getting your story down, leaving it for a while, and then returning to it to see with fresh eyes what you have to work with. You’ll spot the good things. You’ll spot the not so good things, the why did I put that in things, and the repetitions or those sentences you could have phrased better.
But this is great, honestly. You are well on your way to crafting a much stronger story by spotting and deleting these. You do have to kill your darlings.
Reworking stories then is something all fiction writers have to come to terms with though it may be some consolation to know those writers of non-fiction, again like yours truly, have to rework their articles to ensure all is as it should be with these (and yes I’ve done so with this post). All writers have to rewrite and rework.
I must admit this is where I relish working now. I worked as a secretary years ago and used everything from a manual typewriter to an electric one to those where you could see a line or so on screen before hitting the carriage return, and on to the 386s. It is a sombre thought to think I have more power in my mobile phone now than I did in those 386s! But, of course, the typewriters meant I did get used to Tippex, carbon copies, and literal cut and paste work. The latter wasn’t fun though it could make all the difference to having to retype a document or not.
So reworking stories is easier to do now from a technological viewpoint. I relish using Scrivener to easily move things around, to have separate folders within one document to store research items and so on. I’ve never been sorry to say goodbye to carbon paper and Tippex! Oh and the Pritt stick has been consigned to the dustbin of history too.
The Challenge To The Writer
The challenge to the writer then has always been in working out what does need reworking and what can be left alone, which is why I believe having a gap away from your work is so helpful in giving you enough distance to be able to judge your draft objectively enough.
It has been my experience there are two reactions from a writer when they look back at their work. One is to feel this is rubbish, whatever made me think I could write. The other is this is brilliant, give me all the writing prizes now and have done!
Okay, I exaggerate but the truth is neither is right. What you’ll inevitably find is your story is good but there are weak points. Deal with those and you have a much stronger story with a better chance of finding a home out there somewhere.
Sometimes you have to “gear yourself up” so you are ready and willing to get on with making the necessary changes. Not everyone loves editing. I know many writers who loathe it but it is what will make the difference between your work being published or not.
And if you are taken on by a publisher, you will have to work with their editors. If you self publish, it is even more crucial to get the editing right because you don’t want your self published work to stand out as one. It needs to look as if it could have been published by a traditional publishing house.
Why? Partly it is to ensure you are meeting what are industry standards here. You don’t want folk to think your work has been sloppily edited. Also vanity presses are renowned for dreadful editing, if they do any, and you don’t want your work to be associated with that.
Tips For Reworking Stories
I’ve found the following useful and hope you will too. If you can think of any tips to add, please send them in via the comments box. One of the things I love the most about writing is it is a constant challenge to get better at what you do and, so, you are always learning. Good brain exercise!
As mentioned above, give yourself time away from the story. For short work this may only be a few days. For longer work, at least a fortnight would be needed. You are aiming to get out of your “creator’s mode” and into your “editor’s mode” and you need time here.
As part of your editing, read your story out loud and ideally record it and play it back. I use Zoom and set up a meeting with myself, record my tale, and when the meeting ends Zoom converts the file into an mp3 (audio) or mp4 (video) – you choose which – so you can then play it back. By listening to the story in this way, you take it in as a reader would. I have spotted many missing words or details I thought I’d put in and hadn’t when I do this. Your brain does have the horrible habit of filling in what you could’ve sworn was there on the screen/on paper and when you come to reading your story out or hearing it back, you discover those things aren’t there at all.
It’s also useful to have a print out of your story because you see things on paper you don’t always see on screen. Again, it’s your brain playing tricks on you, bless it. If you edit on screen, try to change the font, font size, colour of the text even to make the story look different. That makes it easier to spot things.
However you edit, missing words can be the devil to spot precisely because they’re not there so I make one of my edits a specific one to look for what could be missing. I nearly always find something doing this. I type reasonably quickly (a hangover from my secretarial days I continue to put to good use!) and it is so easy to miss putting words in when you’re typing at speed as many of us do.
Make your last edit the one where you look for spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and so on. As you’ll be changing other aspects of your story, I find it useful to save this until I know I have changed all I am going to change and then go through for these things.
Conclusion
One thing which may encourage you here is to compare an early draft of your work with the one you will submit. You will see how much it has improved. I know this always encourages me.
And we are in great company here. As mentioned, every writer has to rework, contemporary and classic authors alike. It is part of the overall creative process. I think the hardest things can be (a) getting started on the reworking tasks and (b) allowing enough time to do this properly.
There is the buzz of having written something and you do just want to get it out there but patience and willingness to rework as and when you need to are two of the biggest assets a writer can have to help their writing overall.
Related Posts:-
Read interviews with Chandler’s Ford writer Allison Symes: Part 1 and Part 2.
Read blog posts by Allison Symes published on Chandler’s Ford Today.
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