Rewriting Your Novel (Or Moving the Deck Chairs While the Titanic Sinks)

At the moment, my thoughts are on revision because I'm revising my two novels, Ugly City and Volcano Child.

Revising, revising, revising.

I've been working so hard I'm beginning to see double. Are those two laptops I see before me?

Justine (Magic or Madness) has wise words about revising a novel in a long, special post:

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.

Maureen (Devilish) spiced up her blog post on rewriting with plenty of pictures of Cary Grant. She says:

It’s a good thing that the Writer doesn’t design houses—because he would move the kitchen around seventeen times, rip out all the bathrooms, add six more stories, and set fire to the roof.

Unfortunately she fails to answer a burning question: where does she get all those pictures of Cary Grant?

Scott Westerfeld (Scott is Justine's squeeze. The YA universe is a cozy one) has an even more alarming blog post on rewriting a novel (this one was Extras).

Apparently he had to face up to the fact that his ms wasn't working:

there I was, 16,000 words (65 pages) into my shiny wonderful new book. Except it wasn’t wonderful; something was deeply, deeply wrong. The voice, the plot, the structure all seemed to be sucking! No matter how much I edited the writing, smoothed the transitions, caffeinated the plot, or voicified the characters, it all just came out flat.

In the end he threw out most of it and completely rewrote it from scratch.

Which brings us to Scott's ultimate rewriting advice:

Sometimes tossing out vast quantities of words is better than letting a whole book bleed slowly to death. Don’t give up, just start over.

Could you bear to do it?

Don't Write Anything That Doesn't Fit In Your Mouth

They are so funny! Nobody said you had to be funny to become a YA writer! And whatever happened to dignity?

Here's a sample from YA authors Maureen Johnson (Devilish, Suite Scarlet) and Libba Bray (The Sweet Far Thing) in a hilarious pow-wow about writing for teenagers -

MJ: But there does come a very ugly phase, that very very unattractive break before the dawn where the book actually gets written. The book actually getting written is not pretty.

LB:It's sort of like transition in childbirth. That's the period where all of a sudden you rise up out of the stirrups and you grab the labor nurse by her throat and you're like, I can't have this baby! You have to have this baby for me!

Watch it here:

How to Rewrite Your Novel

Right now, I am rewriting my YA novel Volcano Child.

I edit heavily as I write so though technically this is the first time I've given the thing a total overhall, it's had layers and layers of editing over the time it took me to write it.

And what a joy it is to rewrite! The story is there, from beginning to end, and although I am writing new scenes and tweaking plot and strengthening characters, I do so with knowledge. When I was writing the novel from scratch, I was constantly consumed with fear - fear that I wouldn't finish, fear that I wouldn't be able to control all the plot lines spidering out of the story, fear that I'm writing too much or too little or too straight or too pretentiously.

There are no rules of course, about rewrites, though writers, like evangelists, often promote one way over another. Justine Larbalestier recently blogged about rewriting:

My partner, Scott, spends the first few hours of his writing day rewriting the previous three days work. Once he’s got that under control, and only then, does he move onto fresh writing.

Me, I rewrite (while writing the first draft) only if I’m a stuck on the next bit. On the mornings when I wake up and know exactly what needs to happen next, I dive into it. On the mornings I don’t, I procrastinate endlessly rewrite or go back and fill in the blanks where I have notes to myself like [something should explode here] or [figure out where this conversation’s happening] or [what happened to the quokkas?].

I thought I should come up with some ideas about rewriting for the blog but it's difficult - every author is different, every manuscript is different, and different things inspire different people.
What seems to work for me at the moment is this:

• Avoiding my main computer. I turn off the big computer where I do my normal work (web design) and sneak into a dark corner of my bedroom, writing on my laptop. If I used my normal space I would, well, work. I'd do all the admin and invoicing and bits that I've been avoiding for weeks. So I hide from my normal routine.
• I surround myself with books by my current muse. At one point it was Scott Westerfeld. Boy does he know how to make a plot go. At the moment it's Geraldine McCaughrean. I'm hoping her gift would somehow insinuate itself into my fingers. But I'm fickle. On another day, say, when I working on voice, I might have Meg Rosoff tucked into my armpit.
• I morph into a merciless, unfeeling, writing machine and go from chapter to chapter slashing and burning unnecesary text. This might sound like an obvious part of rewriting but believe you me, it's not easy to harden your heart against a thing you created. But you gotta do what you gotta do. In previous rewrites, I've given my characters sex changes, I've turned an ugly man into handsome man, I've looked at the miserable life of one character and devised ways to make her life even more miserable. You have to be a brute.
• I finish everything I start. If on one day I started rewriting a chapter, I don't go to bed until I've finished. If I've given a character a makeover, I don't retire until the last eyelash is curled and the final sinew is flexed. Tomorrow, my resolve might not be as strong.
• And finally, when I am rewriting, I have to reread. And with every change, I have to reread from the beginning. Over and over again.

That's how I rewrite. At least at the moment.

As Justine says:

Whatever works for you is the way to re/write.