Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [76]
Some writers elaborate on this method, rewriting their whole manuscript as they go along. They begin each day by rewriting in toto the first draft they produced the day before, then go on to churn out fresh first-draft copy which they will in turn revise the following morning, and so on a day at a time until the book is finished. There’s a lot to be said for this method. If your first drafts are stylistically choppy enough to require revision as a matter of course, and if the idea of being faced with a top-to-bottom rewrite all in one chunk is unattractive, this sort of pay-as-you-go revision policy has much to recommend it. Among other things, you don’t encourage yourself to be slipshod in your first draft, since your day of reckoning isn’t that far in the future.
This won’t work, incidentally, if you produce the sort of first drafts that require substantial structural revision, with lots of cutting and splicing.
A couple of pages back I described my present approach to writing and rewriting as a sort of doublethink. By this I mean that, although I work with the intention of producing final copy the first time around, I keep myself open to the possibility that a full second draft will be required. If I determine that this is the case, the fact that my first draft is neatly typed on crisp white bond paper doesn’t alter the fact that I have to redo it from top to bottom.
When I wrote Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, I stopped one chapter from the end and rewrote the whole thing. I suppose I could have written the final chapter of the first draft before starting the rewrite, but I didn’t see the point; I knew that my final chapter would be affected by the revisions I’d make in earlier chapters, so that I’d only wind up redoing it entirely later on.
Burglars Can’t Be Choosers got a complete rewrite for a couple of reasons. One stemmed from the fact that I didn’t know the identity of the murderer until I was almost three-quarters of the way through the book. The solution I hit on necessitated a certain amount of changes along the way. I wanted to push on to the end—or almost to the end, as it turned out—before making them, but they did have to be made in order for the book to hold up.
In addition, I was dissatisfied with the pace of the novel. While most of the scenes worked well enough, I felt there was too much wasted time in the story line. A rereading convinced me that I could eliminate a day from the plot, tightening things up a good deal in the process.
I could have tried making these changes by cutting and pasting, redoing selected pages here and there. I considered this but couldn’t avoid the conclusion that the book would profit considerably from a complete rewrite. While it seemed to me that some portions of the book didn’t require any changes beyond an occasional sentence here and there, I decided to retype everything.
By doing this, I made an incalculable number of changes. It’s virtually impossible for me to retype a page of my own work without changing something. Sometimes it was clear to me that these changes constituted a substantial improvement, although this improvement might not have been apparent to most of the book’s audience. In other cases it’s moot whether the changes I made were for better or worse; I occasionally had the feeling I was changing phrasing solely as a respite from the boredom of pure copy typing.
I would never have rewritten Burglars Can’t Be Choosers for stylistic reasons alone. The book was written smoothly enough the first time around, and if I hadn’t had to make structural changes I would have submitted my first draft as it stood. In retrospect, I’m glad I was forced to rewrite it; it’s a better book for the extra