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all of this is pure genius on toast. I was only confused by the part in which you said snakes on a plane was bad. I assume this is a joke.

also, you did not mention that zombies make everything good and should be in all books. aside from that, perfection. this post should be read aloud, to me, every morning at sunrise. can we hook that up?

Thank you!

I took a break from not writing my novel out of sheer frustration because i knew how much rewriting it would need - and this was the first thing that I saw on my friends list.

it’s been a very inspiring pep-talk - and i’m sure it will come in even more useful when i actually finish the first draft bit…

“Don’t worry: Despair is an integral part of the rewriting process.” i keep forgetting, and then having to rediscover this. I think I’ll have it tattooed to my wrist - with proper attribution, of course. happy new year!

Got here from Elizabeth Bear’s LJ site and just have to say, wow. Totally something I’ll be bookmarking and taking back out when I get to revisions on my YA. Thanks for sharing!!

Hi, another reader via Bear’s blog. I loved this post, thanks for taking the time to share. I have a novel that’s going to need some serious rewriting - this really helps cuz I had no idea how to even *start*.

Cheers!

This is an excellent post, dearie — bravo. The only thing I’d add is something I spend a lot of time doing, which is refining how things happen (as opposed to just what happens) to make sure it’s in the most interesting way. This mostly falls under structure, thought most of the time it doesn’t involve rearranging or moving events, so much as reimagining them better. But it’s a bit more than line editing because often it requires completely ditching and rewriting sections from scratch.

oooh, brilliant! thank you thank you for this brilliantly motivating & helpful essay.

i think i am going to needlepoint the bit about despair being an integral part of the experience, so i can hang it over my desk and keep it in mind and not fall into the trap of thinking it is my own deep lameness that brings the despair about.

onwards to the structural rethinking!

found that neither obvious nor boring, and especially not un-helpful. (Additional compliments here have been deleted upon revision — too redundant.)

another visitor thanks to Elizabeth bear…just had to say thanks. I have just deep-sixed 28000 words of my MG since draft 5 died in the middle. I’m starting again, since the structural problems are so deep-seated that it’s way better to start fresh with my old draft as reference and inspiration. your post is soooo timely. I must bookmark you, and will look for your novels for sure! thanks!

[…] How to rewrite (via Bear) 10:48 am comment […]

Voice inside my head #1: “Maybe you should finish the first draft of your novel before you start thinking about rewriting.”

Voice inside my head #2: “You think? She’s not even halfway done with the smallest novel ever!”

Voice inside my head #1: “Yeah, but it’s pretty good. We don’t want negative six weeks of progress from writing too fast, do we?”

Voice of me: “Will you just shut up? I’m trying to figure out a plot here.”

And of course “uni***n” is not on the list of Words To Look Up And Annihilate From The MS because it would never be there in the first place.

I’ve rewritten lots of MSs and it’s never been easy. There are frequently tears, and avowals that I will never do this again. But you make me want to drag something out and rewrite it, which is a bad thing because I’m on deadline to deliver a first draft. (Although like you, my first drafts make my editors weep with relief because they’re so clean… which leaves me wondering what kind of messes other authors turn in.)

Your praise of Scrivener also has me thinking ever-more-seriously about an iMac. Rewrites on the iMac! Maybe they will be more fun!

i finished my first novel just over a month ago. i’m very aware of the need to fix structural before line-editing, and the need to have other eyes tell me what the heck is wrong with my story first. thus i’ve done some initial editing (cut first scene, reworked a chapter, fixed some stupid glaring mistakes) then put it forth for feedback. but despite being in an online writing community and having an offline writing group, no one seems to have the time to read my novel. should i move ahead to line-edits when i myself cannot see the flaws in structure (which I’m sure are hiding there somewhere)? or should i find a third writing group, or continue waiting?

Thank you. That was very informative and helpful. Being dyslexic, I am hyper-focused (often necessarily so) on the sentence level rewrites. I rarely take the time to rework the structure. I usually just say it is broken and move on to the next project. Since one of my New Year’s resolutions is to submit something for publication, somewhere. I think I am going to have to shake the dust of one of my broken stories and try a structural rewrite.

I came from Elizabeth Bear’s site, too, and will definitely be coming back! I never blog in any useful sort of manner, so I’m always envious of those of you who do. Plus, I obviously need you.
This parting line is what really got me:
‘It ain’t easy, but it beats shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.’
Yeah…I suppose it does, but I just turned in revisions to my editor last night (hours before my deadline), and by about 10PM I may have been ready to trade for a ticket on an ill-fated ocean voyage.
Still, I didn’t read it until this morning, so that line did put my last week in the fiery pits of hell into perspective. Thanks.

Thanks everyone! I’m dead pleased it seems useful.

Mary: but despite being in an online writing community and having an offline writing group, no one seems to have the time to read my novel. should i move ahead to line-edits when i myself cannot see the flaws in structure (which I’m sure are hiding there somewhere)? or should i find a third writing group, or continue waiting?

That’s tricky and always a problem. Critiquing someone’s ms. is a huge commitment. I talk about some of what’s involved here. That’s why writers’ groups can be helpful: people are committed to reading each other’s work. It can be hard though, for example, if you’re the only novelist in a group of short story writers.

Basically, I’d say yes to all your questions. I’d keep looking for a group where people were actually going to read your work. (Assuming, of course, that you’re pulling your weight and critiquing theirs.) I’d keep contributing to the groups I’m in hoping they’d finally reciprocate. I’d also contine working on my ms. on my own.

But if you really feel like you’re getting no where with it then it might be time to let it rest and start a new novel. You can always return to it later.

Owldaughter: But you make me want to drag something out and rewrite it, which is a bad thing because I’m on deadline to deliver a first draft.

Oh noes! I am enabling procrastination!

fawesome!!!

Do I have to finish something first?

[…] Rewriting 3 01 2008 There is a most excellent piece on rewriting at Justine Larbelestier’s blog. […]

[…] finally, Justine Larbelestier tells you how to rewrite. It’s a long post, but there are some very simplistic, practical […]

Wow — thanks, awesome post, well-thought out and tons to ponder. this is definitely worth re-reading many times over.

Oh, and what maureen said about the zombies. When in doubt, undead.

arghh me too! my characters are always rolling their eyes, shaking their heads, opening and closing their mouths or brushing lint from their heavily bedazzled pantsuits … but how beautiful is it when dialogue just speaks for itself?
I’ve never thought of keeping a list of overused words - so simple but so useful - thanks justine and happy new year to you and scott!

Now can you tell me how to write the first draft?!?

i’ve been critiquing a lot during winter break, and i was trying to figure out how to put into words some of the stuff that was bugging me, so this post is awesome! furthermore, i think you just summed up my entire theories of rhetoric and composition class, and then some (minus the aristotelian theories–i never did really figure those out :P). and i do all that stuff with my own writing too. writing is hard. *sigh* but i’m finding that critting other people’s stuff has been infinitely helpful in working on my own stories, especially when i see all the things they’re doing right, b/c then i figure out what i can do to make my own story right.

Wow, Justine, a really great post. I see a lot of this stuff going on as I read manuscripts with markings by divers hands (including mine). I’m right now in the middle of the proofs of a 900-page meganovel by one of my favorite writers, who has done major rewriting. It’s fascinating to see how he’s added or taken out details, compressed whole paragraphs to a single sentence, moved around chunks of text in time, etc.

One thing I’ve observed time and time again in every sort of fiction: It works best if there are not too many character names to remember. All the fiction that has worked well for me has severely limited the number of characters’ names. This doesn’t necessarily mean the number of characters; just those with names. Nor are the ones with names necessarily the most important ones. A family saga told in first person might include “my mother,” “my brother,” etc., while the butler, a relatively minor player, might actually be given a name. The main character might have long conversations with a security guard, say, and reveal a lot of his deeper thoughts to such a seemingly neutral observer, without learning the guy’s name. A reader is going to remember “the security guard with the big mustache” much better than “Joe Morgan” when he shows up again 150 pages later.

In a long saga, like The Lord of the Rings or One Hundred Years of Solitude, you’re going to have to have a bunch of names, but keeping the names the reader has to remember to a minimum always seems to strengthen a book. How many spear carriers in your story have names when they don’t really need to be named?

exactly what i needed to hear right now. this was very helpful advice. i’m a beginning rewriter, and i’ve been struggling a lot with a project i’m working on. i find constructive criticism very helpful, and i’d secretly love a ten-page-single-spaced letter of commentary on my writing.

unfortunately, my only critique partner (an excellent editor who gives me terrific feedback) is also an ex-boyfriend. this means that i send him something to look over, he gives me good advice, i revise before going to bed, and then have horribly vivid dreams in which “advice from ex about love scene” and “imaging love scene in action” become one.

clearly, i need to ask more people to look at my writing.

[…] I talked about revision in my last post, and the next Elizabeth Bear’s blog directed me to a post by Justine Larbalestier on how to rewrite. Nice […]

[…] even if it’s for the good of your work. So Justine Larbalestier has written a fantastic piece about how to rewrite. She gives some great, practical examples, including how even Snakes on a Plane could have been a […]

Write something of pure genius. Set it down . . . . come back much later (several cooling days, at least) and hellooooo discover you’ve written complete crap. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Good stuff though. Writers groups are funny: are they good enough to critique you? I mean, really. It’s fine if you like budweiser AND sam adams. You just need to know there are differences . . .

Are they just being mean? Are they tough enough to give good honest criticism (if kumbayah breaks out, ain’t enough learnin’ going on) and are you tough enough to take the good criticism and discard the crap criticism?

And there are few perfect bits of writing: just those good enough that you overlook the flaws while reading and that afterward you feel they aren’t outweighed by the good stuff.

[…] I came across this wonderful essay by author Justine Larbalestier about rewriting fiction.  I think I may print it out for my […]

NoteTab (freeware) has a text analysis function that provides statistics on word frequency. There’s probably other software that does it too.

i said that bass-ackward: it’s that the good bits aren’t overshadowed by any perceived flaws . . .

I don’t think I could ever be as nitpicky about words, like the nod/eyes/shrug example.

How much of that would your editor comment on and how much of that is just personal preference?

First time visitor, referred throuhg John Scalzi’s Whatever blog.

Great post, lots of good stuff. I do some of what you noted already, but you’ve given a lot of food for thought here.

A couple of comments:
“Time saved by writing the first draft fast: negative six weeks.”
Ah, but. I often blitz through sections of first drafts, if the story is flowing well and I’m willing my fingers to keep up with my imagination. You’re right, it takes me longer to fix, but that’s often the most inspired writing.

And:
“I saw a tree. I touched the tree. I could tell from touching it that it was a good tree. I felt the tree speaking to me but I could not tell what it was saying. I was hurt by the tree when it exploded because I touched it. I was angry at the tree.”

If only Hemingway had a chance to read you’re advice about this. It would have saved me a lot of tedium in high school English class.

[…] Larbalestier says all sorts of really intelligent things about rewriting on her blog: There are two basic kinds of rewriting: structural and sentence level. […]

Just yesterday I ran across the concept of using exclusion dictionaries in Word. Here you are with a great list to prime the pump.

Thanks for all the rest too–the despair part is especially motivating.

[…] of Interest (November 27th 2007 through January 3rd 2008) How to rewriteA detailed post on rewriting, and how to do it.Tags: Justine Larbalestier, Writing, howto, […]

Thank you for this - I’m new to writing fiction and have needed sage advice. Seems I’ve found lots of it here

I had a very good writing teacher in high school who managed to get some very important concepts across even though he was “merely” teaching creative writing to a bunch of students who were probably going to forget it all anyway. the first thing he taught us was that if you do not know the definition of a word— the exact definition— you should look it up. He then taught us exercises such as stripping out all of the adverbs in your writing and seeing if you can still get the emotion across, or writing down the first word of every sentence to see if you have a pattern going. (Since this was high school, “The” turned up for most of them.)

those sorts of exercises have stood me well in the years since. Strangely enough, they mostly helped me with my nonfiction college essays, particularly the philosophy papers. But of course they are best applied to fiction— try a few tricks such as those or the ones listed in the main post.

Which plugin are you using for the footnotes? Spiffy!

[…] How to Rewrite How to Write a Novel First Novel Advances Too Young to Publish Being Dumped […]

thank you - I have some ideas on how to rewrite (and have acted on said ideas) but I found some really useful points I’ll have to keep in mind in what you wrote. Such as the list of words to look out for one - one of my characters irritates me by always being puzzled or puzzling things out…

One question on rewriting, about _when_ you rewrite. I’ve read things which say you shouldn’t mix writing and rewriting. Write it all first, then rewrite it. I can understand that ‘creative’ and ‘analytical’ hats can be conflicting and that sometimes one has to just write crap first before improving upon it (which is difficult if you’re thinking critically), but I generally find I bounce back and forth between rewriting previous sections and writing more. Is this such a terrible thing to do?

@soni: I believe the plugin is called wp-footnotes

btw, most people (including me) don’t protect the directory listing on their blogs, so when curious about someone’s plugins, just try adding
/wp-content/plugins/
to the blog home URL.

Anyway, great post, Justin, much appreciated!

another arrival (belatedly) from elizabeth bear’s blog, and also jay lake’s since i was reminded of this by a thread there…

your point about working too hard on the good sentences only to find they don’t belong in the story is very definitely something i need to take note of. i have a terrible tendency to do this, and end up keeping all sorts of earlier drafts because i think they have some lovely but inapplicable bits in them. and i never actually go through and keep or make use of any of these “pearls”. how much better to only craft them when i really, really need to!

i heart you justine!

this is pure gold and i’m going to circulate the link to everybody i know involved in writing/publishing, link it via our website… etc.

thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!

you are welcome.

and so are siamese cats. just so you know.

Herenya: I’d say that it doesn’t matter if you do all of your rewriting at the end or during the process of writing as long as the rewriting doesn’t kill your forward momentum. I wrote a lot in high school (and have saved most of it as a hedge against hubris— it’s pretty mediocre stuff.) The short stories came out pretty well but the longer work never got anywhere because I’d barely get past the second chapter before rethinking the first, so they’d stop before I got anywhere with them.

In college I spent several years doing improv, and the training actually helped with my momentum. “The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.” Every scene went from beginning to end without a pause and you often discovered things in the course of a scene that you never would have if you had the opportunity to go back and fix things. A first draft is much like improv; most scenes need to go forward and be completed. Only a few games feature “repeats” of the action where things can be improved.

Minor rewrites don’t kill your momentum. Major rewrites are sometimes necessary— if you’ve painted yourself into a corner, but going back can get you out, it’s good. And if you can rewrite and still complete, don’t sweat it.

Most of us, though, will have to save rewriting for the end lest we run out of steam before the project is complete.

[…] Justine Larbalestier » How to rewrite Very few people learn to rewrite alone. There are two basic kinds of rewriting: structural and sentence level. Most beginner writers get caught up in sentence level changes. The result is lots of shifting around of deck chairs while the Titanic sinks. (tags: writing rewriting editing reference) […]

@Stoyan

Thanks! Great hack!

Makes me wonder if I should be protecting those directories, though…

*creeping paranoia*

When I read your list of overused words you like to cut out, it reminded me somehow of a JG Ballard story called ‘the index’* - and here’s a story of a robot coming to life. perhaps.

eyes glance…good.
had head - just.
look! mouth! (open, close).
nod.
raise eyebrow (raise, lift)
really seem!
shrug, sigh… slowly smile. so still…
stood suddenly!
then… very…
walk!!

*(”we have only the index, the book itself no longer exists. From this remnant, arranged according only to arbitrariness of the alphabet, one can still discern the outlines of the story of a man who, like his biography, has been expunged from history.” - http://elab.eserver.org/hfl0093.html )

[…] No Comments Australian fantasy novelist Justine Larbalestier has a funny and extremely practical essay on her blog about rewriting. She explains the difference between structural and sentence-level […]

This is wonderful. It makes me want to go out and buy an editor to sit at my right hand, and a reader to sit on my left as I draft and redraft until I’m blue in the face and can no longer see the wood for the trees.
I am on a writers forum, but the critiques are so banal it makes me wonder what I’m doing there. I try to be honest on other people’s work so why can’t they show me the respect to be honest on mine? Sure, it’s great to know the good bits, but I struggle with strucure and no-one bothers with that. They would much rather tell me, eg, I’ve missed the apostrophe from I’m, or the comma before an -ing word.
Thank you for some great tips DIY tips. I will now get back to work

[…] craft, editing, favorite blogs, the internet   Justine Larbalestier has a great article on how to rewrite. Go read […]

Awesome information. I like how you mention how rewriting frequently involves large changes, like reordering entire chapters or excising huge chunks of text. This is the most important type of rewriting in terms of how it ultimately affects the readers’ perceptions, but too many inexperienced writers skip straight over it and jump directly to sentence-level rewriting (I will admit I succumb to this temptation as well).

[…] been up, but we’ve just found it: an excellent entry on Justine Larbalestier’s blog on re-writing. She gives some fantastic advice, great examples, and tips to help you through that tricky first […]