One of the things that makes what the Internet has degenerated into so useless is that, far from being an open field for ideas we were promised it has become so totally organized around selling
crap.
The crap in question includes
cheerfully glib advice of the self-helpish variety.
So does it go with, for example, the advice one is likely to found online regarding the matter of rewriting.
Those who have ever attempted to write seriously know full well that rewriting is a part of writing--usually a very important part.
But they also know that many writers--I suspect, the great majority of them--do not particularly enjoy rewriting, quickly come to find it actually painful, and have only a limited patience for it. Indeed, I suspect that far more than will admit it would love to never do it again--to just crank out the words and be done with them, with cleaning up the resulting mess someone else's responsibility (as was often the case with the pulp writers back when making a living selling fiction to magazines was "a thing," as I suspect
is the case with those Big Names of today that the Dauriats of Park Avenue are prepared to indulge in this way).
The combination of the importance of the rewriting, with its associated difficulties and stresses, makes it a subject worth discussing honestly. But consistent with the aforementioned uselessness an online search for discussion of this matter leads you instead to either
1. Stupid denials of the reality. (Thus do people say things like "You don't like rewriting? Why, I've never heard of such a thing! I personally LOVE REWRITING! So, no I don't understand it at all." Or they say "You think you hate rewriting? No, you only
think you don't like rewriting. The reality is you love it, you just don't know it yet!" before trying and failing to change your mind.)
or
2. "Advice" that persons of even modest intelligence probably thought of long before anyone told them, will quickly hear a hundred times if they do any looking into the subject, and which is unlikely to have enough practical value at all to have been worth suggesting the first time, let alone the hundredth. ("Try to think of rewriting as writing!" Okay. Except that if you think of rewriting as something other than what it actually is, how likely are you to go about the task properly? Besides, even overlooking that hugely important fact, what they are telling you to do is switch the label on the activity, as if this would switch the reality. Of course, it doesn't, revealing this for the simple-minded charlatanry that self-help advice usually is.)
I write this post in the hopes of providing something a little more useful--though I know full well that the search engines will probably do neither I, nor any readers who might actually find this item useful, any favors in the search rankings, much more likely burying it under a city dump's worth of stupid denials and "advice" I have been talking about. Still, here is what I have to say about the matter:
A great many people dislike and even hate rewriting, and if we do not admit that key fact we will never get anywhere. This is, partly, because much of the writing we do we do not because we want to, but because we have to (and if, like myself, you have ever had to
teach writing you will see how much patience people have for that).
However, even when there is no such element of compulsion people still dislike rewriting--and it is easier to understand why when considering what those who like writing like about it. What, I think, people who love writing love is the experience of the words flowing out of their brains and onto the page, during which they may actually experience a
"flow state" in the sense in which psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi used the term.
Rewriting is not necessarily like that--I emphasize "necessarily," because rewrites are not all the same. If one gets lucky in revisiting a draft they have completed they may find that
1. They do not have to do very much rewriting. Most of what may have seemed wonderful during that first writing process may
actually be wonderful, and finding that out can make a "rewriting" process feel very good indeed. (It may, in fact, be that rather than rewriting they have actually just done something much lighter and simpler--their supposed rewriting really more like an easy copyedit.)
and/or
2. The rewriting they must do is intuitive and easy. They look at something that may not work, and see the solution right away, everything just falling into place right away. When things go this way, again, they may actually feel good. Indeed, going about the work in this way they may experience that "flow state" people can get when the words flow out of them.
Of course, the rewriting experiences that make people hate rewriting are the ones where they do not "get lucky." Rather they find that what they wrote was not so wonderful at all--that maybe it will need a lot of work if the piece in question is even to just look
decent. That in itself can be bruising to the ego, and callous or insulting as many tend to be about it, sniveling about a writer being "
oversensitive" and the like,
this matters--precisely because of how this process can leave an experienced writer fearing that they cannot get through a simple text message without a dozen crippling mistakes, with all that entails for one's creativity and productivity.
Moreover, the work of rewriting is likely to not proceed in that intuitive, flow state-inducing way. Rather they find again and again that they must stop and ponder what they did, puzzling out what does not work and why--an experience likely to kill any slippage into that flow state as instead they find themselves self-conscious, unsure, confused, awkward. When they do puzzle things out they are likely to find that the work requires them not to merely cross out a word here or make a different word choice there, but actually rearrange material--and eliminate material--and create new material to take its place. It can be very hard emotionally to let go of what one has created, especially on those occasions when that bit was satisfactory, or even very good, something they are perhaps proud of, but which must be discarded because however good it was in itself it no longer fits in with the rest of what they are doing. It can also be very hard to create the new material that must replace what they forced themselves to cut out--the effort to produce it likely to be a matter not of creative flow but of straining, maybe straining painfully, to pile one word atop another to cover over some hole their rearrangements and excisions opened in the text--and maybe watch the pile collapse before they are done, so that they keep rewriting the same portion of their work again and again.
Doing even a very little of this can be exceedingly time-consuming in itself, while it often feels as if one has done much more of it than they really did, because, the time consumption apart, that work process is deliberate, stop-and-go, self-conscious, confused, awkward, forced,
painful. (Certainly when applying Track Changes--as I always do during a rewrite--I find that undertaking the work I often felt like I did a lot more alteration than I really did, the actual portion of the text marked in the colors and formatting indicating deletion or addition not as much as I would have guessed just going by my subjective feeling during the work.) Moreover, the writer often does not do "a very little of this," what they thought would be a small job turning into a big one as they find that altering this insignificant-seeming passage
here, they have to alter all those others
there in their turn; that, maybe, what looked like an alteration at the level of a paragraph or even a sentence will necessitate alterations all the way up to the level of the whole structure. And they may, in their dissatisfaction with what there was before, and their consideration of new possibilities, cross--be forced to cross--the frequently thin, sometimes almost invisible, line between "fixing" and "changing," the complications entailed in which Robert Ludlum summed up well in his introduction to a reprint edition of
Trevayne when he explained exactly why he
did not try to update what seemed to him a very timely book: "As anyone who has . . . remodeled a home will tell you, once you start tinkering, you may as well throw away the schematics. It becomes a different house." So they end up building the different house, but in that much more arduous way--that stop-and-go, self-conscious, confused, awkward, forced, painful way imposed on them by doing it using so much of the material of the original house as against starting that different house from scratch, while possibly forsaking what might have been a perfectly good older design, because they tinkered in that way that a significant rewriting can make very, very hard to avoid.
As if all of this did not itself make it difficult for a writers to take emotional satisfaction in any results they achieve there is the fact that they have no guarantees that, for all their work, they are actually making their first draft any better than it previously was--and have plenty of reason to fear that they are doing the opposite. Just as work produced in that state of creative flow is likely to "feel" better than it actually is, work produced in that more arduous, deliberate, way is likely to feel worse than it actually is--the strain of the work making them expect that the material when looked at will feel strained to the reader, as the whole, rather than having a happy unity that it at least seemed to during a flowing writing process, is to them too obviously a Frankenstein's monster of stitched-together parts.
Moreover, especially if the rewriting is heavy, they know they will have to give it
another look, which will lead to
more rewriting. Indeed, they have likely come to anticipate from past experience that another round, maybe many rounds, of the same time-consuming, deliberate, stop-and-go, forced, painful, Frankenstein's monster-stitching process lie ahead of them. Especially if they are astute enough to space out those rounds of rewriting, because they know that they can only do a decent job with the next round if they look at it with a fresh pair of eyes requiring a long break from the material, they know that the unpleasant process of rewriting this particular work will remain part of their lives for quite some time to come, with no guarantees about when it will end, or even if it will end with any positive result. Many know what it is to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite again--and in the end be forced to give up the work in hand in defeat, and have in the end the kind of "learning experience" that the moralizing tell us is edifying, but which everyone would really prefer to do without. And they know that all this can, and in the long run probably will, happen to them again, because they hoped they would never have to deal with the really grueling kind of rewrite ever again and were disappointed in that hope again.
Keep in mind, too, that through all this the writer likely has the normal human eagerness to be done with a job that felt as if it was done (and yes, even knowing intellectually that rewriting is part of writing the completion of that first draft still feels like a completion)--especially if their time is limited, and they must be concerned for their productivity, and there are other things, including other writing projects, they would like to get to (and who is not in that position?), with this perhaps weighing the more on those who (in contrast with a writer who has a deadline at which point they must simply turn in what they have, especially if it meets some minimum level of acceptability and someone else will take it from there) in the end answer only to themselves. After all, they have to decide when "Enough is enough"--another burden of responsibility that may not weigh so heavily when the rewrite is light work, but which weighs very heavily indeed when it is not, the more in as the way we are taught to think about these things give us very little guidance. (We are almost always enjoined to put "more effort" into what they are doing--and almost never advised about when it is time to leave well enough alone, when doing any more would damage something that is as good as it is likely to get, messing up what might have been quite a good enough house had they known
when the right thing to do really was to "be a quitter.")
Only an idiot would trivialize, would brush off, what all of that means from the standpoint of the writing experience, and the writing life. And I think it worth saying that, contrary to what many of those who brush off expressions of distaste for rewriting would have us believe, that hating rewriting is not necessarily a sign of callowness or laziness. Often it is an indication of the complete opposite--because the person who hates rewriting
takes it seriously enough to do the job right, and to have in the course of doing the job right have had some of those bad experiences; to have known the really grueling rewrites when "tinkering" turned into building a new house, or rewrote and rewrote and rewrote and just never got it right, and maybe even suffered in deeper ways for it. (Frankly, it seems to me that suffering too much in the course of rewriting can undermine the ability to write--make that critical function work in overdrive, suppressing that essential word-generation, while ceaselessly discouraging the would-be writer by reminding them that, yes, they are going to have to rewrite afterwards.) Indeed, it is probably the most conscientious, the most ambitious, the most perfectionist who suffer most from rewriting, and get to hate rewriting most. By contrast those who think rewriting is only a very slight thing are likely to not actually know much about rewriting, perhaps even to have dealt with it only in a very superficial, lazy, way while flattering themselves that they are the superiors of those who have expressed less than happy thoughts about the task.
Of course, for all that a writer who actually cares about what they are doing will suffer through the rewriting process as described here--but are entirely entitled to their feeling during that process rather than having it trivialized by the Internet Idiots. I would also add that they deserve better advice than said Idiots tend to offer them, and the search engines shove in their face should they mistake of seeking out some meaningful comment about it.
In keeping with what I said earlier of the glib "advice" so many give on such subjects I will not presume to offer the reader such "advice." But I do think that honestly appraising what rewriting involves, and why it can be so difficult and uncomfortable, is a better start to helping us all figure out how to cope with the problem, than the ceaseless repetition of banalities that so characterizes the small and mediocre mind, and which always seems so salutary to the respecter of conventional wisdom.
