Normally, I don’t like to do any rewriting during my first draft-stage. I just want to plow through and get that story written. But I’ve had an unpredictable summer. Life didn’t always go as planned. (Didn’t ever…) And here I am at the end of September with very little to show for those summer months.

Last weekend, I went on a writing retreat with my husband. Just a little one to the Washington Coast. The goal was to write lots and lots of words. My Bradley wrote like a mad man and finished his screenplay.

I am so proud of him!

Me? I started the weekend at 48,086 words. I ended the weekend at 50,103 words for a grand total of 2,017 words added! Whoo hoo! I was pretty disappointed but at the same time, excited. Here’s why:

Like I said, summer was hard. Things didn’t go as planned. And I hadn’t opened that manuscript for over a month. I was too far away from that story and those characters to be able to pick it up and continue where I had left off. There was too much distance. I knew this when I agreed to the writing retreat. And my plan had been to read a chapter a day for two weeks so that when I got to the cabin in Long Beach, I’d be ready to go.

That didn’t happen. I was way too busy doing life all week. And my best laid plans went awry.

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So when we got to the beach and loaded up our laptops, Brad started pecking away, and I started reading. I didn’t get very far before problems began to crop up. All of my side characters were faceless names. I needed to flesh them out a great deal. I also needed to do some more worldbuilding for each country. Overall, I needed to do some rewriting to get myself in a better place before I continued on. How did I know this? Well, as I read, I just kept thinking, “That needs to change. Oh, that too. And that. Gosh. This here doesn’t make any sense. In fact, why would I have two scenes where both characters appear before the Council? That should happen at the same time.

“But ug. If that happens on the same day, I’ll need to combine those two chapters, pick which POV to write the scene in, and I’ll make a huge mess, time-wise, since one chapter came before these two meet and the other chapter came after.”

You get the idea.

But I’ve been at this writing thing for a long time. I’ve written twenty-two books. And I knew what needed to be done, even though I also knew it would be painful and take me the whole weekend. I needed to rewrite what I had so far. If I did this, it would set me up to succeed in finishing the rest of the story.

If you’ve ever found yourself in such a place, here are a few tips for how to tackle this kind of a project:

1. I hit “Save As” and saved a copy to mess with. That way, if I accidentally deleted too much, I could open my original and find the old scenes.

2. I started moving chunks of story around. Copy and paste, copy and paste. Scroll, scroll, scroll. I worked quickly to simply move the pieces of story into the right order. Anything that I deleted entirely I pasted into my “Cut Scenes” document. Many times I’ve never looked at my cut scenes again, but there have been enough times when I’ve lost something and wished I’d kept copies. So I’ve learned my lesson, and now I keep stuff. At least until the book is done. 

3. I went back to the beginning. I started at page one and read/edited my way through. I fixed what needed fixing. And each time I came to a side character, I wrote down that name in a file with a brief description so that I would have a master list to work on. Now I can decide which county each person is from and give them their own little stories. That way, as I continue this draft, I’ll be able to bring these side characters to life. Then later, when I do a full rewrite, I’ll not only have made these side characters real, I’ll have a cheat sheet to refer to if I can’t remember something.

4. I added new scenes. Cutting out chunks of your story and moving it elsewhere creates problems. There were some holes in my story. There were some characters who were now in scenes before they had actually met my heroes. So, as much as I loved some of those scenes, I had to fix all that, change those characters out, and write new dialogue so that the scenes now made sense.

I got through it. In fact, Sunday morning, I wrote two new paragraphs on chapter ten! I was finally ready to get started on a writing retreat. But it was, sadly, over. Time to go home. Ah, well. At least my story was finally at a place where I could jump in anytime and write whenever I got a chance.

Has this ever happened to you? If so, how do you deal with it? Share in the comments.