I imagine most of us have had Michael Crichton quoted to us during a writing class or a time of frustration with a manuscript: “Books aren’t written—they’re rewritten.” (Though I’ve often heard—and probably even misquoted myself—it said as “Good books aren’t written—they’re rewritten.”)
This is one of those rare pieces of often repeated writing advice that I think is completely true. Even if the original quote doesn’t have the word “good” in there, I think it’s implied in the statement that we’re talking about books worth reading.
So what does it mean for you and me that we don’t write [good] books, we rewrite them? Here’s what I’ve realized it means for me:
I often think through plot points before I start a book. (I’ve talked about how I plot here.) For some writers, very intense plotting appears to work. For me, I’ve learned that when I’m trying to plot out every detail it’s because I’m trying to remove the messy part of the creative process. But creating is inherently messy (more on that in point three) and I can’t plan my way out of that.
This is also known as the concept of writing a bad first draft. This is a technique I embraced about ten years ago, and I never looked back. I talk about it in detail here. This has worked great for me, but it doesn’t work for every writer. My friend, author Roseanna White, wrote a wonderful guest post for us on editing as you write.
Recently, I’ve felt discouraged over the way I write books. Writing bad first drafts is still what best helps me to produce books. But as I’ve taken on more ambitious projects, I’ve notice that those first drafts seem, well, badder.
I write my first draft. I give it six weeks to rest. Then I reread my book, and I see a lot of things that need to change. Like, a lot. And I rewrite about 50 to 75 percent of it.
I’m a person who loves efficiency. Having to rewrite that much does not feel efficient.
I’ve tried plotting more before I write the first draft, and that doesn’t seem to do me any good. I still end up stumbling along the way and discovering problems that I hadn’t anticipated. No matter how much I plan ahead, I cannot seem to avoid having to basically rewrite the majority of my book.
I’m currently reading Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull, one of the co-founders of Pixar. I’ve been comforted by all the stories in there about how their movies evolve along the process. That Monsters, Inc. started out as being about a man who didn’t like his day job, and Up was originally about two princes living in a castle up in the clouds. Aren’t we glad they reworked those stories to make them great?
As wonderful as it would be for my first draft to be amazing, that’s not the nature of them. Creating and discovering a story is a messy endeavor, and if my desire is to write a great story, then I have to embrace the hard work of editing.
I know a lot of young writers struggle with editing. I sure did. Editing is a different skill than writing, so if until now you’ve spent a lot of your time learning how to write an entire book (which by itself is hard to do) then you can’t expect to automatically be good at editing.
You’ll have to learn how to edit the same way you learned how to write—practice. The first time you undertake editing a book, you won’t be very efficient. It might take you a long time and it will feel messy. If you keep at it, you will learn and grow and get better, the same as you do with any skill.