I Have to Rewrite the Whole Thing?!

They say you have to murder your darlings, and you think, sure, I get that—a phrase here, a sentence there... But what if the feedback is that a whole scene isn't working? Or a whole chapter? What if you're asked to add or remove an entire character or, God forbid, rewrite the entire novel?

Why would you even consider that? There are lots of possible reasons. Here are a few off the top of my head:

• A chapter isn't working and needs to be cut entirely or replaced with something else.
• You removed an entire character and need to rewrite whole chapters or scenes.
• A hard drive crash caused you to lose a huge chunk of work.
• After finishing a first draft, you realize you love the world and characters, but the plot isn't working at all.
• You returned to an old draft after several years and want to update it with everything you've learned.

Rewriting something you've already written feels bad, hard, impossible. It took so much work to get those words there in the first place—why would you want to do it again?

Let me reassure you that, while it does feel scary, a rewrite is never as bad as you think it will be for one simple reason:

You already did it once.

What's hard about writing something the first time is that you don't know what will happen or who the characters are or how to say what you want to say. But after having written it once, a lot of this mental work is already done! And if you've lost work and are just trying to redo it, it's even easier. You don't have to think about changing anything—you can just try to remember what happened and write it as though you had outlined it already.

The fear of rewriting largely comes from this unexamined idea we have that what we wrote the first time was good, and we're afraid we won't be able to replicate it again. But you absolutely can.

You did it once. You can do it again.

What's even better, the act of a rewrite allows you to improve what you had written, because you're not starting from scratch. You have a foundation to work from—even if it's just in your head—and you can actively improve on that foundation as you rewrite.

Most of the time, doing a rewrite is optional. But if you're willing to try, you can find great freedom and flexibility in your story. You'll discover what I said in a previous post: that your novel is always soft and malleable. And when you've finished, you'll often find that you love the new version more than you ever loved the original...

...you know, the one you thought you could never recreate.

Perhaps most importantly, you'll begin to learn to trust yourself—your skill, craft, and experience. And that is where the really good writers are born.