Rewrite Your Book
not really... but maybe?????
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News!
“Care and Feeding” is out in The Rumpus (content note: law enforcement, mental health, description of violence)
“Good Dead Girls,” is out in No Tokens (content note: sexual assault)
Hi friends!
Yesterday I went hiking with a poet and a philosophy professor, and all three of us are working on books—books that we’ve been working on for years. We’ve written, and published, books before, but every project is its own entity and sometimes that past experience doesn’t so much teach one how to write a book as simply how to stick with it. We know now that it will be years, and it will feel like it’s never going to end, and the chasm between what we want the book to be and what it actually is—what we can actually make it—will feel so wide and impossible to cross. But we’ve gotten there before, which I think helps with being able to say, okay, it all seems unworkable now, but I’ll be able to get there again. And the feeling of that arrival will be so worth it, when it comes.
It was funny because even though we’ve all been working on books at the same time before—we’re pretty much always working on books, lol—it just so happened to line up that we’re all at basically the same stage right now. We’ve got a completed draft, and not just a rough draft but one that we’ve really labored over and revised and tended to and loved and had at one point considered, if not complete, then well on its way.
And then we sent it out to readers and got a little distance ourselves and returned to the page and realized … (cue dramatic music) … the book is not done. Not just not done, but the book hasn’t even taken shape yet. It’s a collection of ideas, and good lines—maybe even some great lines!—but it’s by no means there. It’s by not bad, not at all. But it could be so much better.
We can talk about our individual struggles and the particulars of our books, but honestly the process is pretty similar no matter the genre or the predicament. The solution, in all of these cases, no matter the book (and the three of ours are completely different—novel, poems, academic monograph), is some variation of “rewrite the book.” Yes! Rewrite it! Which I know sounds extreme, but if you want to write something that’s not just “not bad” then this is, I’ve come to think, kind of a key part of the process.
I always joke that once I finish a first draft, I can finally go back and start writing the actual book because now I know what it’s about. My friend the philosopher said he needed to get through his earlier drafts to discover the center of his argument, and then write the book that’s actually about that argument—the book he’d hoped it would be from the start. Obviously it was hard to spend the last year and change rewriting something he’d already poured so much effort into. But now that the finish line is in sight and he’s feeling good about his project, he was sincere when he said “it was worth it.”
I think this is true whether one is a planner or a pantser—whether one outlines in advance or allows the story to unfold without pre-planning. I can take notes and plot and plan and execute, but everything is hypothetical until it’s on the page. Everything looks different once it’s 300 pages of prose, not a 300 word synopsis my agent says looks super exciting. Characters take on new dimensions. Stakes that made sense in that synopsis aren’t as clear when spread over an entire narrative arc. Sentences need sharpening, sure. But so do whole plotlines. It’s easier to sustain narrative momentum in a summary; keeping that engine running along can require more fuel than you’d planned for. I’m not starting from scratch with my rewrite—although I’ve done that before! Multiple times, with multiple books! But I’m adding in new narrative threads, a bigger midpoint turn, a more dramatic final reveal, new scenes to further cement and respond to these changes. All in all, I’m reimagining the story in a pretty significant way. I wish I’d known what I know now before I started writing, so that I could have written it this way from the start! But that’s like wishing I could go back and relive years of my life with the insights and perspective I have now.
We are, in addition to being three writers, also three teachers (two professors and one former professor—me—who is now an editor, which is a form of teaching but without all the department meetings, thank god) and my friend who is a philospher shook his head and said this is one thing his students are always the most resistent to: this need to rewrite. Not just edit, or revise, or change some things here and there, but really dig in and rethink something from the ground up, with a sustained amount of attention over a significant period of time. I think that’s been one of my biggest discoveries over years of trying to work out this whole “writing” thing, and the difference between my novels that never made it out of the drawer and the ones that I think might actually have legs, as well as the novel that will be published next summer and whose stakes and centerpoints I kept having to go back and rework and rework and rework in order to get right.
Once you type “The End,” you have an insight into your manuscript that you didn’t have when you were typing “Chapter One.” What have you learned about your book through the writing of it? What do you know now that you didn’t before, and how can you pour that knowledge back into the page? You don’t have to scrap everything and rewrite from scratch, but the act of reimagining—of freeing yourself from the constraints of what you’ve written in order to imagine it anew—can open up all sorts of possibilities you’d never considered, and get you that much closer to the book you’d wanted to write all along.
My question inbox was empty this week!!!!!!! What tragedy! I hope that means you’re all steeped in the momentum of your projects, soaking up the last rays of August, and preparing for whatever transitions fall will bring for you. A reminder that I’m here for any questions you may have, about writing, querying, submitting, publishing, and surviving and thriving in this strange and beautiful artform we’re all committed to. Shoot me a message—it can be anonymous!—and let me know how I can help.
Keep writing!
Kate