Firstly thank you very much, I've always loved english and I hope I'll be good enough to maybe translate most of my stories. (Sadly translation should always be done in your first language, even though it feels obvious) And yes I truly imagine the consequences of writing on such a big scale. Any character trait, plot and subplot, or anything that concerns the world you wrote will destroy pages and chapters. I totally agree with you on that. I heard a famous writer (sadly I forgot his name) who claimed he could spend literally years on the construction of the storyline and it's plots. In the french educational system I learned to outline everything on a draft before starting a work. (I guess you did the same thing throughout the English classes?) I think writing in a more 'improvised' way can be fun and has certain advantages but many of them are temporary. You will write stuff that won't work out throughout the storyline and will have to edit more than if you had already thought about that in through the construction/structuring process earlier. I guess this whole dilemma put simply would be: the faster you write the actual story, the quicker you'll get the first draft in hand but the more time you'll have to spend editing. Thank you for the great quote and your help. I can truly understand the re-writing process now.
Or, what I think is more often the case, you end up with a bunch of half written stories because you constantly paint yourself into a corner. Public education in the US id an od duck. States are in charge of what is taught for the most part, and a lot of it has to do with money, and other things. Here is a short story. I was born in Cali, went to 1st, 2nd grades. Then we moved to the NE to Mass. When I started 3rd grade I had no idea where to sit because all the names on desks were written in cursive; they had learned cursive in 1st grade. I was there for 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th & 8th grades. I learned outlining, the thing where you break sentences into map-like lines with the different parts (diagram?), prepositions, etc. When I moved back to Cali, my high school (9, 10, 11, 12) teachers didn't know what prepositions were! Couldn't break down sentences, etc. When I left school, probably about 35% of the kids leaving were borderline illiterate. I lived in an upper middle class area. A lot of the people that still live in that area remember me when I go there because I was the 'guy that read books'. My mom was an English major, worked in a library and taught us to read as soon as we could read, where a lot of the people I grew up with struggle to read a full article in Sports Illustrated. Don't get me started on the public vs charter school debate that is raging now. We now have a woman in charge of education for the country, who has no children, her husband owns one of the largest insurance companies, and her brother founded Black Water mercenary company. She is doing everything she can to ruin public education, in my opinion.
I myself have never rewritten anything from scratch. When I write have a story I pretty much have about 90% of it written down or in my head. I always allow a certain degree of ad-hoc writing and plot turns. So when I refer to rewriting, it would never be rewriting it from scratch. Of course, when I write my final draft, I might go back and erase or change parts of it -that might be rewriting, but once I am done with there first draft, it's pretty much how I want my story. Then comes the process of fine tuning. And that might be called rewriting?
I would say it depends on how bad the first draft is. Me, I've "rewritten" the first part of my book a few times, but more than a rewrite, it ends up filling in holes and moving stuff to better locations.
Crazy! I'm in my final school year before university (last grade of high school?) And I actually studied this during my Spanish lessons! I'm in the public education and they made me learn the dilemmas Columbia faces with education. Lots of riots and rage from the people. I made an essay over this subject! Please know that I'm totally with the columbian people and am aware Columbia is one of the country with most inequalities. Keep fighting and I hope your shitty government will one day understand... You were lucky to keep reading and I know it will help you for the rest of your life. It's heartbreaking to see developed countries with major issues like illiteracy (and many more like poor social services etc.) !Viva Columbia y viva la educacion!
That would be 12th grade, the last year of high school (at least that's how it is in the United States). We'd also say you're a senior in high school. For some reason they give names to the four years in high school. Freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
While I understand your view, it's a massive misconception. Some people's brains (like mine and a few other people I know on here, but I won't bring them into it) work much better by going on the adventure with the characters. Planning it all out is stunting to me. I'm not saying planning is wrong, but it does not work for me, and makes me bored with the whole thing. As to painting myself into a corner and having tons of unfinished stories - No. I do not. I rarely write myself into a corner, and on the rare occasions that I do, it's easily fixed. It irritates me, honestly, when people imply that an unplanned novel can't be as good as one that is extensively outlined and planned. It's not true, and it's elitist and annoying. It's like saying van Gogh could have been so much better if only paint-by-numbers had been available to him as a child.
I guess you are right to write in a way that suits you best. Writing is hard enough, there are no reasons to follow some unwritten rules if it doesn't work for you. I really understand why you would write this way and respect it. Personally, I really enjoy the outlining, structuring development part. The writing is the hardest bit (yeah and I want to write a 100k words novel) The less I have to think during the writing part, the better. I've spent the last eight months on my outline. And the small amount of writing I've done (14k) has to be erased because I reedited everything... So absolutely, outlining two much also has some issues.
I think it mandatory for a person to go through the editing process. I hammered out 2 chapters in a week and 10000 while typing my reference manual and honestly when I went back and read it, it was awful. It lost some necessities in the process of my translating my scenes outlines to paper and I skipped important info. I was only able to fix it by editing it. ETA: Separate documents I copy and paste and do my revisions to compare. Sorry, should've been more clear.
I don't plan, either. I start writing and the plan forms as I go. Also, when I paint myself into a corner, after some work I usually find out it's a scene I need, just not THERE. I've moved several scenes around of late and it's painting a brighter picture.
Yeah, my point was that everyone does things a little different and there's no wrong way. For me, the writing is the FUN part, and I can fly through 100k in no time at all as long as I have the time and not much in the way of distractions. That's the hardest part for me, the time and limiting distractions. Every possible way of doing it has pitfalls.
My current process seems to be: - Have scene inspiration. - Write the scene two, three, five, eight times, until it's a relatively polished unit. - Assemble scenes like quilt squares. - Write more scenes, gently trying to nudge them into the right point in the timeline so that they glue the preexisting scenes together. Of course, some of those polished scenes are going to be dissected as things change. But it appears that the polish is unavoidable; at least this project is driven very, very strongly by the emotional interaction between the characters, and that means that one phrase or word or gesture can end up mattering to me. Does she just ignore the glass or does she actually push it away? Does she let him help her into her coat or does she just take the coat out of his hand or does she get ahead of him to grab it off the hook because she knows he'll want to help her or does he insist on helping her into it, in which case maybe it should be a cloak so he can just drape it over her shoulders and it isn't a wrestling match? Does he look at her when he says that, or does he say it offhand while he's doing something else? When he says it, does he use the euphemism or the brutal truth? When he uses the euphemism does she come back with the brutal truth? It all matters. So I have scenes I spent two days on that will probably never make it into the book. And that's OK, because I enjoyed writing them, immensely.
Hahaha of course. So many parts are tossed away. My first five chapters have been chunk down in two... and with a different plot. And it will continue during the writing process, I'll chunk more and more. The characters lose or gain attributes, you give them an object or an emotional attachment, and everything has to be edited and rewrote again. Something in the setting, politics or spacetime changes make the story totally different. I wanted to write my story as if it was today. When I changed it during 1998 to 1999, everything had to be changed. no smartphones, no internet, cars, clothes and prices (dollar value) change. So we have to change it up again and again. Because it'll be waaay to simple to have all the good ideas before we start writing. But we guess we write because we are crazy, mmh?
I"m glad you do not fall into the "more often the case"; unfortunately most do, that is why it could be called "more often the case".
Which is why I said it's a misconception, because most of us who write this way do not, in fact, end up the way you stated.
I know I don't - after I finish Gravity I'll have one unfinished project out of the thirty-five stories I've started writing.
I don't feel the need to rewrite every last word in any given scene unless enough simply see it as a hindrance on the overall story. Even then I think I can find a way to not have to rework those parts over by basically adding a completely new body (seems a bit tedious and might change the feel of things by extension). Though in extreme instances it is necessary, but not every single word of every single chapter. So the bigger question you have to ask is: What is it about your own personal writers voice/style do you simply find contemptible? (Reason I ask is there has to be more going on beneath the surface. You wouldn't punish yourself over your prose, if there wasn't an underlying cause in that thing between your ears.)
I agree with Trish. Steven James (Story Trumps Structure), at a writing conference I attended last year, said that he did his best writing by working himself out of the corners into which he had painted himself.
I feel that how much 'rewriting' you do depends on the state of your first draft and your desire to get it to be as perfect as you can. We don't all start from the same place, so there isn't really a formula that will apply across the board. I'm a perfectionist, in that I want my finished product to be as good as I can possibly make it. I'm not afraid to make mistakes as I write, but I'm damn sure I'm not going to let them lie during the edits. There are many mistakes I made in the first draft of my first novel that I won't make again, so that's certainly not been time wasted. I think the more you write, the more you learn, the fewer mistakes you make the next time you try. For me, the short answer to the OP's original question is no. It's not mandatory to rewrite an entire novel. If I lost interest in my story altogether, or found some major problem in it that couldn't be solved (such as basing it on a true historical occurrence which turns out to be a totally fabricated piece of shit) then I would simply abandon it. However, if I do still care about the story, I'll rewrite as much and as often as necessary to bring it up to a high standard.
