Dread and Despair

Writing a novel is a balance of art and craft. The first draft sets your right-brained creativity loose on the page to create worlds out of words. There are no limits or rules except for the ones you impose on yourself and your characters. But in the second draft, you need to rein in that free spirit, binding and gagging it in the trunk if necessary. In your second draft, craft is king, hammering and chiseling out the defining structure that turns the book you wrote into the novel that’ll make you proud enough to sell it to strangers.  

This is the real work of writing and often what causes aspiring authors to give up. The reasons vary but usually boil down to one underlying thing: impatience. They thought the entire process involved writing a story, polishing it, then finding someone willing to publish. I was there a long time myself, even after seeing how a full rewrite of The Road Cain Walks made it so much stronger. I’ll get back to my personal writing journey in the next post, but for now, the main idea I want you to hold onto is this: though rewriting a full novel can be painful and time-consuming, it’s worth it.

Becoming a Loving God

The fundamental work of a rewrite is going to look a lot like the first draft. Stepping into the uncharted territory of a new scene, you’ll find many of the same obstacles. Some days, the words won’t come, usually as you try to get the “what happens next” perfect. My advice for the first draft also applies here. Household chores and long walks can shake those mental clogs loose. The soundtrack of songs that remind you of your story will help you focus on the feeling you’re writing to convey.

What makes a rewrite difficult is elevating your writing to the scene level instead of the plot level. If you finished your first draft, I’m assuming you fell in love with the idea of plot-level writing. As the god of your own personal mythology and universe, you created a world and inhabited it with people you dreamed up. You wrote words and things happened.

The job of the second draft is to present a clear visual of how those things happen, transcribing the movie in your head for your readers. Every novel, even every scene, will be different in terms of how much work this requires. Your first draft is sure to have plenty of action and dialogue or else you wrote an essay instead of a story, but when you wrote those scenes, you likely were wide-eyed in amazement at the idea you were actually writing a book. The second draft needs a more sober perspective, writing within the framework of your own creation.

First drafts are often written as sparks of ideas. You experience your plot the same as the first time you watched your favorite movie, each plot twist a surge of awe-inducing endorphins. But think of the way you felt the second time you watched it. The third. The twentieth. The more intimate you became with that story, the more you noticed deeper details and plot nuances. This is the goal of your rewrite. You know what happens—hell, you’re the reason it happens—but omnipotence is a worthless power if you don’t use it.

With all your knowledge of everything that happens in your first draft, write the story again. You’ll find a deeper understanding of the choices you made and better ways to convey your vision to readers. Characters will reintroduce themselves and inform their parts with a logic beyond what you intended when you originally wrote them. Your writing will gain depth that will separate you from the writers who turned back as soon as the work became difficult.

Writing New and Improved Scenes

At some point in the rewriting process, you’re going to come to an unwritten scene, an event that needs to happen for your story to make sense. Whether it’s the introduction of a new plot point or expansion of a previous one, it’ll open the ground in front of you like a sinkhole. Just remember how much fun you had writing that first draft, switch back from analytical mode into creative mode, and haul in some dirt to patch the hole.

As with all my advice, the specifics are up to you. I start each rewrite session with a glance at my outline, focusing on the scene of the day and whatever work needs to be done. If it involves writing a new scene, I’ll follow the same mantra I used for the first draft: get it down, get it right, and get on with it.

The major difference of the second draft is you lose the ability to phone in details for later. This is later, so you need to get the specifics right. I don’t waste much time tinkering on the sentence level (the focus of the third draft), but I at least try to get it as close to final as possible. That’s not to say you can’t just throw some words down to have something to revise. If I feel momentum stalling, I’ll do that exact thing but with the understanding I’ll need to revise what I’ve written before moving on to the next chapter.

If the first-draft version of the scene already plays out the way you want, it’s still worth giving it another pass. Put a couple blank lines above the existing text and start retyping the sentences you intend to keep. Look for inconsistencies in content and voice as well as places where minor tweaks might strengthen the scene. Details to make it more visual. A line of dialogue that foreshadows something to come.

The “god’s view” provides an opportunity to strengthen plot threads, weaving them into the fabric of your story.  Imagining each thread in literal terms creates a weave effect and complexity within your plot. I anchor the major events of a thread in three separate places (introduction, rising action, and postclimax resolution), blending them into the main plot lines as much as possible. The strategic placement of events can propel your story forward as if by an engine, resulting in some of those big revelatory scenes you love in your favorite novels, books, and television shows. 

The key word during a rewrite is “intentionality.” Be intentional with every visual, choreographing movements and directing dialogue while trimming the fat of unnecessary exposition and explanation. Anything outside of a physical scene or segue from one scene to another makes good fodder for the chopping block. If you want to save any of those targeted darlings, look for a way to incorporate them into action or dialogue.    

Keep the Flood Gates Open

As with your first draft and the wool-gathering period before starting your rewrite, the drip of ideas will hopefully remain constant. They might change your mind on some subplots or how your main plot develops. Some will be great ideas and others pitfalls that either weaken the story’s structure or steer it into a dead end. I vet mine through the notes app on my phone, adding any fledgling ideas to read again and consider later. If it’s sticky enough to survive, I’ll add it to my working outline in the spot where it will enter the story. Vague ideas have no place at this level. Either let them stew until they’ve proven themselves essential or save them for the sequel.

It'll take an extra level of work and an extra measure of time, but eventually you’ll finish this draft the same as the first one. You’ll be so ready to be done and working on the next novel germinating in your brain, but keep in mind that your story deserves the attention. It deserves to be done right and this is what you’re giving it.

Thanks, as always, for your attention. In my next post, I’ll discuss the publication of my second novel, Southern Ouroboros, and how it derailed my writing career.