Rewriting by Nicky Browne

According to John Green ‘All writing is rewriting.’ Yeah, I know and a first draft is only the

beginning of a process. I explain this to my creative writing students and tell them to get anything down on the page because it can all be fixed in edit. I am utterly sincere and a total hypocrite. I hate rewriting. I grew up in the twentieth century (without a type writer) I want to do as little of it as possible.

I vividly remember the first day I realised that editing was a necessity. I must have been about  twenty-seven and working with a real live journalist on a press release for an international oil company. Reader, he changed my words!

I was horrified. I’d said what I wanted to say. It made sense, what was his problem? He peered at the printed text and chewed on his lip. ‘Now, how can we say this better?’ he asked. Reader, with that polite question he changed my world! What? You can change things and make them better? I was a lesson I needed to learn, but years on I remain a reluctant, recalcitrant, heel-dragging, chocolate-consuming, ill tempered procrastinator when it comes to rewrites. 

Over the years I have published nine novels and like most writers  have four, maybe five, completed novels knocking around that need fixing. Periodically I go back to them. I reread them, pleasantly surprised to find that they aren’t that bad, that with a little bit of tweaking they could almost be good. All I need to do is edit them and get them out into the world.  So I try to fix them. One is now 10% fixed - the rewritten section has a moderately engaging first person voice with an  entertaining ghost as a side kick/ conscience and  some commercial potential and the rest of it ...er  hasn’t. I won’t bore you with my inadequate attempts to fix the others. I know what they need. I just balk at doing it. Even short novels are long when all the words in them need changing and all the words need changing  because I know I can make every line  better: I wish I’d never met that journalist.

I will be honest, I have been overwhelmed with the weight of these unfixed words: the switch from distant third to intimate first person, the dream sections to be excised, the new characters to be introduced, the witty apercu I am required to invent, and all that honing and polishing! Frankly it makes housework look interesting.  So, this week, I put the endless rewrites to one side and started something new. 

Oh. My. God. As I would write if I were twenty years younger. I remember now, this is what I do. I take a blank page and make stuff happen. At the beginning of the day there is nothing, at the end, a growing story: characters, conversations, complications, motivations, proliferate like weeds and there isn’t time to prune or tidy because this thing is growing so fast. Who would stop? I don’t care about the uncrossed ‘t’s, the slightly dodgy phrasing, the overuse of ‘ slightly’ and probably ‘dodgy’, this thing is alive and thrusting all over the place.

Yes, proper grown up writing is all about rewriting, but this other thing, this mad tumult of ideas and words, the wild moments of making things up, for me is what writing is all about. It is raw and messy and unexpected and probably a bit rubbish but it is joyful and fun and, if I’m honest, the reason I am a writer at all. So, it will be a little bit longer before my four or five unfixed novels get fixed. Sorry.