Why Is Rewriting So Hard?

Every time I finish a project, there’s a ridiculously naive part of me that thinks, “this is really good. Maybe it doesn’t need a rewrite.” It does. But that doesn’t stop me from pretending that my first draft was perfect. It’s a little lie I tell myself to protect my ego from the dread of facing a rewrite. 

Why is the rewrite so dreaded? I think because it’s fundamentally invalidating. You’re admitting to yourself that what you did wasn’t good enough and that you need to start again. Anyone who’s spent hours assembling a piece of furniture only to realize that they put an important piece on backwards can understand this. That feeling that you’ve wasted hours of work is demoralizing and rips the wind out of your sails.

This may explain some of the dread behind rewriting, but it’s important to understand that, unlike the furniture analogy, having to do a rewrite doesn’t mean you’ve wasted your time. This is a lesson that’s taken me a long, long time to learn. 

I’m a planner. I’ll spend weeks outlining, notecarding, and writing copious character backstories before I even start on pages. So when I’m into the first draft, I feel like I’ve figured the story out. But sometimes you need to write a hundred pages to realize what the story is actually about. I’ll write one killer scene, or even a single exchange of dialogue, and suddenly the fog will lift and I’ll see the story clearly for the first time. 

The project I’m rewriting now took me two drafts before I realized I wasn’t answering the central dramatic question. In this case, while it was my immediate instinct to still feel foolish at wasting my time, it was also a liberating realization. I was able to instantly cut thirty pages, and the missing sequences came to me in a flash of inspiration. It’s like my brain knew what needed to happen all along; only my analytical, structural storytelling brain got in the way.

I know some writers who try to mitigate the rewrite dread by doing what’s called a vomit draft - just getting the first draft out as fast as possible because they know they’re going to re-do it. This can work, but it also comes with its own set of problems. By not going in with a clear outline or plan, you run the risk of getting stuck and losing your enthusiasm for the project.

I think the happy medium is probably somewhere between the vomit draft and my overly analytical development approach. Go in with a plan, but be open to that plan changing. Just because we think we know the story we’re trying to tell, sometimes we can be pleasantly surprised. Not to get too mystical here, but there is some truth to the idea that divine inspiration can take hold of the writer during the creative process. Whether you call it the Muse, or God, or the ghost of Shakespeare, I firmly believe that when we tune our mental antennae to a creative wavelength, we can get signals of true inspiration if we’re open to them.

Being open to changes will not only save you unnecessary pain during rewriting, but it’s a handy skill to have as a professional writer who needs to appease editors and creative executives. The challenge is to reframe that rewrite from something to dread to an opportunity to bring us closer to the story we’re trying to tell. If we can do that, maybe we won’t need to tell our egos those little lies, and we can approach rewriting with honest enthusiasm.