Insane Dames

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Rewrites Versus Revision

by Sue McKlveen

I have a bunch of old romances that I’d written early on in my career. I’d conveniently hidden them in a file that I promised would never be opened or my eyes might burn from the poor writing.

This morning, I was thinking about one of the plots for one of those books. I decided I’d check it out and see if I could revise the thing. How bad could it be, right? I’ve written tons of books since then, but it wasn’t that long ago that I’d worked on revising it.

The first sentence put me to sleep. That’s how bad it was. The writing was horrible and the heroine was considering sleeping with the hero in the first paragraph, which isn’t usually a good sign. The conflict wasn’t there between the two and the writing was worse than I thought. The dialogue was stale and I was posing all my characters in each paragraph. With jarring point of view switches, adverbs everywhere and everyone having pools of lakes for their eyes, I decided that it was beyond fixable. Yep, it was bad.

I initially put it away, brought it out again, then put it away. I went grocery shopping, trying to decide what to do. For a revision, I knew I’d fall into the old traps, convincing myself either it wasn’t that bad or it was so bad there was no hope.

Now what? I made a decision, while in the checkout line, watching the old guy bag up groceries. The thing didn’t need to be revised, but completely rewritten.

I had the basic idea for the plot, and will now consider the story to be my initial outline only, with deviations encouraged because it was so boring.

I’m now in the process of looking at a white screen--a new document for the same book…well, sort of same and couldn’t be happier. I get to keep my characters and basic plot but make it better.

Is your book in need of a complete rewrite? Is a revision just going to make it worse, or stale? Consider a rewrite, because it may turn out better than you think.

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