Here We Go Again

I used to think of complete rewrites as emergency measures for books that really sucked. Something people who write very messy first drafts do. Something you do when the book is terrible but there's a good idea in it. Sort of like a brain transplant.

Now I'm thinking about my very own first complete rewrite, and things are starting to look different.

There's this book I've been working on since November 2009. I wrote it. I let it rest. I gave it to critique partners. I printed it. I edited it. I let it rest again.

I'm pretty sure it doesn't suck. I still like it, after having worked on it for a year and a half. The betas liked it, too. Sure, there are some problems. But until now they seemed like minor issues that, after the first revision, could be solved with some tweaking and polishing.

The more I think about it, however, the more I realize that all that tweaking and polishing would only make it an okay book. Good, but not the best it could be. To make it the best it could be, there need to be deeper, structural changes. And since the current version has a complicated scene pattern with three first-person narrators any substantial changes point me toward a total rewrite.

There are other reasons, too. The genre is not quite right. Some of the subplots don't work as well as they could. Thanks to my multiple first-person narrators, moving scenes around is extremely tricky.

Polishing it to make it the best version of what it is right now would be easier. But in writing you don't benefit from taking the easy way out. If you know what you have to do to make your story the best it could possibly be, then you go and do that. No excuses.

Never having rewritten the same story, I am not sure what I am getting myself into. What do I change and what do I keep? How do I preserve the essence of a great idea and characters that I love without getting bored by writing the same book twice?

I don't have any answers. Not even a clever guess. But I suppose I will find out, through trial and error. Which is all that writing really is anyway.

So, here I go again into charted-yet-uncharted territory. Wish me luck. And do share any words of rewriting wisdom that you might have in the comments!