Rewriting, with a difference

I attended the fabulous QWC/Hachette Manuscript Development Program in 2011, and one of the most radical changes I’ve experienced since then is how I redraft a novel. My approach has shifted from messy and undisciplined to structured and analytical, and it’s helped me improve not only the novel I wrote for the Program, but also my approach to every other large writing project.
Jon Appleton, the then children’s publisher at Hachette, said I should consider reordering the events in my novel. He suggested I improve on some other things as well – details, really – and was so encouraging and kind that I came away thinking that all my manuscript needed was a bit of fine-tuning and a lick of polish.
How wrong I was.
I got home and fell right into my old work habits – rewriting sections, checking transitions, tweaking details, shifting scenes around to see if they fit better elsewhere, and eliminating the odd subplot.
But even after a month of solid redrafting, my novel still wasn’t working. I read and re-read books on writing and perused blogs to see how other writers tackled the redrafting phase. Little by little, I began to realise that my current approach would not improve my novel.
Why? Because I was so focused on the finishing line that I’d lost sight of the most crucial element: the novel itself. I’d created an impasse for myself, and I knew that unless I took a radically different approach, I wouldn’t be able to move forward.
So I did the exact opposite of what I’d always done – I banished creativity (temporarily) and treated the redrafting process as I would any other work assignment: clinically and objectively. I forced myself to examine the skeleton of the story and identify its core structure. This was hard work, and I spent a lot of time staring blankly at large chunks of text as I tried to extract the essence and purpose of individual chapters. Once I’d reduced the novel to a handful of dot points, I transferred these to post-it notes.
Each post-it note included:
- Chapter number/title
- A phrase describing the key event of that chapter
- The POV character
- The setting/location of the action
- The characters who appear or whose names are mentioned in that chapter
- The chapter’s primary role in revealing character development, setting or plot
- Some post-it notes also flagged major turning points for the two central characters
I arranged the notes on butcher’s paper to create a storyboard for my novel. I left this on my table for two weeks, moving and combining and separating the ideas. I scrunched up several notes and lobbed them into the bin, wrote more or improved on the ones that I had, unravelling and restitching, examining and interrogating that storyboard until, finally, I had a structure that felt right.
This new sequence provided me with a clear picture of what the narrative and character arcs were doing, and it gave me immediate directions when I began rewriting.
- If the chapter title didn’t reflect the chapter description, then I changed the title. Pretty obvious, but I didn’t always notice the connection until it was right under my nose.
- Identifying the setting/location helped hone the descriptions/language used in the chapter. It also determined what the weather was doing. And if there were two or more distinct settings, then I considered breaking it into two chapters.
- Knowing which characters make an appearance/are mentioned was particularly crucial when I was reworking the beginning of the book, as I didn’t want to introduce too many characters all at once. It helped for the later chapters too, where several characters were involved – I could sort out who was critical to the narrative, and who didn’t really need to be there at that time.
- If I wasn’t able to point directly to the chapter’s primary role in revealing character development, setting or plot, then I went back and had a good hard look at what was going on, and shifted descriptions/events/actions around where needed.
- I could see the spread of things, such as character turning points. If character turning points/revelations came too close together, I shifted them further apart. This helped with narrative pacing and character development.
- I was able to play around with character POV a lot more, identifying chapters where a POV switch might provide more tension and narrative drive.
This process helped me to gain a deeper understanding of chapters as being their own separate entities as well as elements of a cohesive bigger picture. It also taught me to pay attention to the subtler aspects of novel writing. And the most satisfying part is that it inspired a much better title for the book.
*This post is an updated version of a couple of older posts. The originals can be found here, here and here.