Oh Dear... The Challenges of Rewriting

I just realized I have to totally rework The Inferiors.

Again.

The first time I had to fix it, luckily I'd only written the first 30K out of what's now 112,000 words.  It was challenging.  Rewriting something you've already written is ridiculously hard!

Fortunately, I only had to rewrite 30,000 words then.

Now?

I've got 112K to sift through.  Hopefully I can keep a lot of it.  There are a few parts I don't want to lose, but the entire thing needs to be shortened.  Reason?

I discovered that the "end" isn't actually a good place to end the story.

In my head, I have a timeline of all three books.  Originally, when I first started writing book 1, I had no idea it was going to be a trilogy.  It was all meant to be one book.  But when I began to hugely exceed the standard YA word count, I had to break it up.

Anyway, my mental timeline includes just about everything in the story, from beginning of book one to the end of book three.  And as I'm going over it, there's no way book 2 can end where it did!  (Trust me, I've read over it like four times and the current ending is lame anyway.)

So, in the end, I guess I'm not rewriting it all.  'Compressing it' is more accurate I guess.

Rewriting is Hard.

Okay, so for a while, I've been procrastinating. I've been stalling and making up excuses for myself so I don't have to work on rewriting my sequel. It's not a full rewrite. The last time I wrote in it was November and I had only 33,000 words.

Still. That's like, a third of the book.

I ended up convincing myself that rewriting would be easier than drafting. But, I was in for a really big surprise.

Turns out, rewriting feels twenty times harder than drafting, thank you very much.

You'd think that since you already know what happens and about how to write the scene, you should be okay. But what's hard is writing something you've already written differently.

Well, I stopped procrastinating last week after we got home from the cruise. And despite how hard it was, I'm so glad I did it. It needed to be fixed because it was going totally in the wrong direction. And now, I've got 21,000 words of the new version. Just 12,000 more to go, and I'll be good!

Now I have to give a lot of credit to my really awesome critique partner. She's been working really hard, editing The Trials and as I'm reading over book 1, I'm getting so many new ideas!! (And if you can't tell, I'm getting really excited, too :) )

So, if you're willing to take advice from a fifteen-year-old, here it is: stop procrastinating today. Even if it's just for the day. Good luck!

What do you guys think about rewriting? Is it a lot harder than drafting for you?

Okay, well I really better get to work now! Have an awesome day!

--Jess

P.S.

I've been thinking of starting up a Music Monday thing on my blog since music is such a huge part of my writing. I don't know. What do you think? Good or bad idea?

Sequel Issues...

Okay. If there's one thing about writing that I'd prefer to avoid, it would be rewriting. And I'm not talking about the rewriting you do while editing. I'm talking about full scale rewriting of everything you've already written.


After editing book 1, my characters had changed into (hopefully) less flat people. They've grown quite a bit compared to what they were in my first draft. The thing is, I started writing book 2 before I was done editing book 1 which probably wasn't the smartest idea. So I've got a lot of things to change.


My problem is this. How do you find a way to say a lot of the same things in a completely different way?


I know it sounds like a silly question because we do it all the time when we edit. But for some reason, this is different for me. Am I just over thinking it? Or do you guys feel the same way?


Have you ever had to completely rewrite your book? How do you get it done?


--Jess