Random Acts of Language:Rewriting to Death

by Nick DiChario

You’ve probably all been there. You’ve written something—a story, an essay, a chapter—and you just know you can make it better. Time for a rewrite. Move this paragraph. Change that line. Add a snippet of dialogue. Oh, yes, that’s it. That reads much better. Stellar. Tasty. Sweet. Perfect. Until tomorrow, or the next day, when you look at it again. Well, all right, maybe a bit more tweaking is in order. A semicolon here, a stronger verb there, and do you really need that dependent clause? Ten more minutes, maybe an hour, and you’ll be done.

If you’ve ever been through this maddening cycle before, I’m sure you’ve already recognized the pattern and symptoms. Not only is the piece not good enough tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, it’s simply never good enough, so you never submit it, and hence, you never see it published. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” (Sir Walter Scott, by the way, talking about the reoccurring nature of conspiracies.) And let’s face it, the only person you’re deceiving here is you. You have conspired against yourself, my friend, and you are the perfect victim. You’re either afraid to let the work go, or you’re a hopeless perfectionist. Any way you cut it, you’re cutting your own throat.

My point, of course, is this: there comes a time when rewriting becomes a very bad habit, and much like other bad habits, you become dependent upon it as an easy excuse to avoid rejection. This excuse occurs at all levels of writing, not just with beginners. A friend of mine, an accomplished novelist, hasn’t submitted any work in more than ten years, and I’ve seen some of it, and it’s pretty darn good. Who suffers for this? The world, for never having seen it? The publisher, for publishing someone else? The agent, for selling someone else’s work? Nope. Who’s behind door number one? That’s right, you, the author, for not cutting the ties that bind you.

Rewriting to death is not only a seriously destructive delaying tactic, it can kill a perfectly good piece of prose before it’s had a chance to live. The process of endlessly smoothing out your writing can easily lead to bland paragraphs and flat sentences. What you end up with, quite often, is a grammatically pristine surface that never breaks the plum line, that fails to inspire or ignite anyone’s passion except (and here’s the really dangerous part) your own. If you rewrite to death, you may easily lose that spark of inspiration you so cleverly and subconsciously planted in the first draft, the very creative impulse that led you to sit down and write the piece in the first place.

It’s a messy little proposition, this rewriting thing. You obviously have to do it, but how do you know when you’re overdoing it? That’s a great question, not easily answered. The typical responses aren’t very satisfying. For instance: “You must have a feel for when you’ve done as much as you can do with a piece of writing.” What the heck does that mean? As the bully in my fifth grade math class used to say, “Feel this, jerk weed!” Or how about this one? “Have another writer look at it for you, someone you trust, and let that person tell you if it needs more work.” That answer is a little better, but it’s still poppycock. I’ve got news for you. Most writers are obsessive rewriters, just like you. It will never be good enough for them either. Worse yet, they’ll give you plenty of suggestions on how to make it better, and guess what, now you’re rewriting even more. You’re better off asking your dear ol’ mum what she thinks of it. At least she’ll say it’s perfect just the way it is.

So what does that leave you with? All I can tell you is what has worked for me. Give yourself a deadline. Whether it’s two days, two weeks, two months, or two years, it really doesn’t matter. Give yourself a deadline and stick to it no matter what. Have your envelopes all filled out and ready to mail, and when the deadline comes, like it or not, submit the manuscript. It might sound like harsh medicine (or angry candy, as Harlan Ellison might say), but in the end it works. You give yourself enough time, you rewrite to the best of your abilities, and then you say goodbye to your baby until it either gets published or returns home with a wet diaper. C’est la vie! This is how it’s done. This is how you move on and become a better writer, because believe it or not, you don’t improve much by constantly reworking the same old material.

And if you think it doesn’t work, I’ll end this column by telling you a dirty little secret. I wrote this article in one hour, set it aside for twenty minutes, rewrote it, and then sent it to my editor. Why? Because my editor reminded me in an email that I hadn’t written my column yet and the deadline was up. (Yes, I was a very bad little boy.) So it was either turn it in or get bumped. Granted, I might not win the blue ribbon at the fair for best rhubarb pie with this column, but I’m proud of it nonetheless, and even more importantly, you’re reading it and getting something out of it, which is the whole point, after all, when you come right down to it.

Anyway, you can break the habit if you really want to, and I sure hope you make the effort so that I can read some of your brilliant prose someday. I’d love to, and I’m sure a lot of other people would too.

Nick DiChario is the owner of The Write Book and Gift Shop, located in the quaint little village of Honeoye Falls, NY (www.Writebookandgifts.com), the official bookstore of Writer-On-Line. His short fiction has appeared in science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and mainstream publications in the United States and abroad, and his work has been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century, among many others. (Some of his short fiction may be found at http://www.fictionwise.com.)
Nick has also been nominated for a John W. Campbell Award, two Hugo Awards, and a World Fantasy Award. In addition to writing stories, Nick is the fiction editor of HazMat Literary Review (http://www.hmlr.org), a magazine dedicated to printing new voices and politically aware poetry and prose. Some of his plays have been presented in Geva Theatre’s Regional Playwrights Festival in upstate New York, and he is the workshop coordinator for Writers & Books (a non-profit literary center). Nick’s first novel, A Small and Remarkable Life, will be published in spring 2006 by Red Deer Press.