19 Dec 2023

Why No Author Can Do Without It

Of course, the rewriting work varies, depending on the author, in its depth and duration. With experience, fortunately, the first drafts improve and certain reflexes that we acquire allow us to choose our words better, to construct our sentences better, to describe better by diverging from the obvious. Essential stages of the creative process, rereading and rewriting are rarely valued. 
As an aspiring author, we like to imagine an ease of writing that would free us from the difficulty of going back in time. Reread, correct, remove a word, add another, realize the flatness of the dialogues or even the superficiality of the characters: rereading and rewriting allows you to confront the strengths and weaknesses of your writing. 
Take the inevitable rereading of essays in high school: the exercise is arduous, sometimes painful, often done in haste; but, conducted methodically, it makes it possible to improve the quality of the whole, to avoid structural errors, inconsistencies and typos. 
Yet rewriting can be one of the most interesting and exciting stages of the creative process, especially for an aspiring author. If we understand its usefulness, with a little method, the exercise can be transformed. We then hurry to place our words on the screen or paper to offer ourselves the pleasure of working with the material at our disposal: language, in all its nuances, its beauty, and the twists it allows.

Why rewrite?

Everyone can write, that’s a fact. Most writing workshops don't offer anything more. A theme is given, a period of time to express oneself on the subject, then a collective reading of each person's writings; Everyone then goes home, happy to have written, without having really progressed. 

Where the efforts count, where the difference is made, is found in the next step: rereading your texts. It is then a matter of dwelling on each word, each sentence, each paragraph, and analyzing them in order to improve the whole in depth. Both in form and substance. 

A first draft contains both the enthusiasm of its creator and his heaviness, his pure energy but also his bad habits. Take the sculptor or the jeweler, each working the material to create a work of art. For an author, the process and the requirements that govern it are the same. 

Spontaneously, ideas can come to us, fluid, untouched, pure but also enveloped in the most obvious, most expected forms: a dark corner, the heat of the sun, a cascading laughter. All are immediate images, so well known that they no longer surprise us by what they evoke. 

Clichés, poorly formulated ideas, repetitions, too common terms, this is what rewriting should allow us to reveal and exclude. 

Rewriting is the stage where you learn to write better. It is a work of improving the text and the emergence of the style essential to each author, even more so for aspiring authors.

It is the rewriting that will really bring out the author's style, his literary imprint, well beyond this first draft. 

Proofreading and rewriting: how to work on a text?

Once convinced of the importance of perfecting your writing, you still need to know how to go about it. Four main axes of rewriting can be listed: 

1/ Deletion

When studying the manuscripts of certain famous authors, what we first notice is the number of erasures. Words and entire sentences are removed in order to relieve their writings of the excess of their first drafts. 

It is therefore a question of proceeding by elimination to aim for the essential, ridding your texts of flourishes and creating a rhythm when reading. 

And deleting does not only mean excluding but also implies grouping or condensing terms or sentences which benefit from this commoning. ‍

2/ Substitution

Mode of narration, lexicon or even syntax, substitutions during rewriting can affect all facets of a text. A first draft will have been done in the third person but, on rereading, appear much more gripping by resuming the narration in the first person. 

A common substitution to keep in mind: spontaneously, many authors tend to use verbs in the passive form and expressions in the negative form. However, using the active form for verbs and the affirmative form for expressions is often much more effective and allows the rhythm of the text to be better revealed. ‍

3/ Expansion‍

Upon rereading, we may realize that a scene has not been developed enough or that a dialogue between two characters is missing in order to better help the reader understand a twist in the situation. It is then a question of deepening his first writings with additional passages and enriching his manuscript. 

Capsule of an author in the making

In terms of figure of speech, there is one which is based on this principle of expansion and which I particularly like: anadiplosis. 

4/ Travel

Collage or permutation, the last major axis of rewriting consists of moving a word, a paragraph, sometimes an entire chapter in order to balance the story or make its sentence fairer. 

When moving just one word or expression, the goal may be to enrich a sentence, sharpen it, or even modify its meaning. Because any movement in a text, even minimal, leads to transformations and effects of meaning. 

The movement of a passage or an entire chapter is more due to the modification of the narrative thread. 

Rewriting is therefore a question of balance between these four axes: going to the essential while knowing when a passage needs to be more developed, substituting certain terms for others while deciding, in certain cases, to rather use them. move. 

Some good practices for working on your first and subsequent drafts

Even more precisely, here are some recommendations for reworking your texts, valid in all circumstances. Here are five among many others:  

Tolerate as few adjectives and adverbs as possible
Prioritize the choice of the right verbs
Make sure in which direction you want to take the reader and how 
Vary your sentence structure and vocabulary 
Track down all forms of inconsistencies (narrative, lexical, etc.)
Let us consider these elements as part of a mental reading grid which must gradually imprint itself on the mind. 

It's about reading your text as if you were your own reader, with the same demands, the same intolerance for the weaknesses of your text, the same enthusiasm for successful passages. 

Let’s remember the sometimes uncomfortable reality that rewriting is often the longest step in the creative process for aspiring authors. No, it must be the longest step because it allows you to progress from version to version of your manuscript. And let's not forget that the first draft is followed by many other drafts before reaching a sufficiently accomplished form to present one's writings to others and progress further, through the reader's perspective that they will bring.

My experience as an author in the making

Previously, I didn’t enjoy the rewriting exercise. Without a method, without sufficient awareness of the benefits that this could have, I focused above all on the first draft, followed by an overall rereading before presenting it to those close to me. I state it clearly today: do not do this, under any circumstances. 

Although I felt that my text was not good – in any case subject to improvement – ​​I had not gotten into the habit, at the time, of dwelling on each word. I lacked knowledge, but above all awareness: the craft of writing, the shaping of language, the refinement of a published text whose printed pages reveal nothing of the years of effort that preceded them. 

The years of training in the Brandon cycle gave me a taste for rewriting, among other things. Method and days, months of practice to understand the recommendations and start applying them to myself. 

At first I was frustrated by sometimes having to spend more than half an hour on just three or four sentences. Me who had gotten into the habit of writing nearly a thousand words a day! But it was no longer a question of quantity – the machine was now launched – but a question of quality. 

I then had to get into the habit of remembering all the instructions to improve my texts, paragraph by paragraph, both in form and content. It is a continuous process of forcing oneself to work on one's texts without tiring but, when one perceives the difference between the two versions of the same chapter, the satisfaction one experiences is indescribable. We experience the joy of writing, in its purest form.