“Faced with a text, the reader can transform the words into a message that deciphers for him or her a question historically unrelated to the text itself or to its author. This transmigration of meaning can enlarge or impoverish the text itself; invariably it imbues the text with the circumstances of the reader. Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.”
—Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
25 Things You Should Know About Revising & Rewriting
terribleminds.com3. It’s Cruel To Be Kind
You will do more damage to your work by being merciful. Go in cold. Emotionless. Scissors in one hand, silenced pistol in the other. The manuscript is not human. You are free to torture it wantonly until it yields what you require. You’d be amazed at how satisfying it is when you break a manuscript and force it to kneel.
“I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers. — Vladimir Nabokov,”
—flavorwire
“I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful. You know it’s finished when you can’t do anything more to it, though it’s never exactly the way you want it.”
—James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78Die SchwarzerKanal
transdiffusion.orgUnable to prevent the population from watching, they created Der schwartz Kanal, ‘The Black Channel’, a peak-time ‘news’ programme where government (or Stasi) approved journalists provided a commentary over re-broadcast ARD and ZDF programmes.
In these bizarre, not to say downright creepy, programmes, West German broadcasts were pulled to pieces, with the presenter explaining to the audience the ‘real’ meaning behind the broadcasts they knew the population had been secretly watching.
News was freely re-interpreted. Drama was shown as nothing but arch propaganda against East German ‘democracy’. The lives of westerners were shown to be empty, lacking fulfilment and above all cold to the concerns of each other except where money was involved.
“John Adams and Thomas Jefferson argued over whether the correct word was "inalienable" or "unalienable," with Adams winning, not on the floor of Congress, but by quietly "correcting" the printer before publication.”
—Insights into the Declaration of Independence’s drafting process from The Writer’s Guide to Everyday Life in Colonial America by Dale Taylor.
The Art of The Rewrite
litreactor.comFace it: your first draft is going to suck. There’s no avoiding that. Bad writers and conceited individuals will stop after the first draft, but you and I both know that we’ve only just begun. All great writers are also great rewriters, with only a handful of legendary exceptions.
The Newly Discovered Art of Rewriting
I have just recovered from a slight panic attack. What caused it, you ask? Let me tell you.
I’m working through revisions and I reached a scene where my protagonist’s motivations and beliefs within that scene are considerably different from my first draft to the second. As I was trying to revise the scene, I had a moment where I found that I couldn’t put in my changes to the scene without making a million other changes to the scene, because otherwise I was contradicting myself - or, better yet, my narrator would be contradicting herself - one paragraph to the next.
Basically, let me put it like this: the scene needed to be rewritten, not revised.
This was what I came to realize which stopped my panic attack. “What am I doing wrong?” was my number one thought, “How can I fix this?” was number two, and “I should hide in a corner and cry” came in number third. And then my sister said something very potent. She said “Just go write it! You’re rewriting! So write!” (Or something along those lines.)
But she was very accurate. The central emotions of the scene has changed, meaning that the entire scene needs to change. There are a few pieces of information that still need to be given, and certain things that still need to be processed, but how they’re given to the reader are going to be entirely changed. Originally, the narrator believed, but held doubts. Now, the narrator needs to be entirely doubtful, with moments of belief. That changes the entire way the scene is built, meaning that the scene, as a whole, needs to be redone.
That difference, that balance between what can be revised and what can be rewritten, is something that I am very, VERY glad I learned now and not on draft eighteen (or some other obscure big number). To all writers, take note: a first draft needs to go through both revisions and rewrites. Understand what the differences are and why a scene would need one or the other.
I’m nice and relaxed now, and can go back to my revisions/rewrites. But that knowledge, that moment of clarity, makes me feel like a real writer. I’m not just making small changes and editing my manuscript. I’m rewriting entire scenes.
